Kiss Me, Stupid is a 1964 American sex comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Dean Martin, Kim Novak, and Ray Walston.

A. L. Diamond is based on the play L'ora della fantasia (The Dazzling Hour) by Anna Bonacci, which had inspired Wife for a Night (Moglie per una notte, 1952), an Italian film starring Gina Lollobrigida.

While driving his Dual-Ghia from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, lecherous, heavy-drinking pop singer Dino is forced to detour through Climax, Nevada.

There, he meets the amateur songwriting team of Barney Millsap, a gas station attendant, and piano teacher Orville J. Spooner, a man easily given to jealousy.

[a] Orville invites Dino to stay with him and wife Zelda, but becomes concerned when he learns the singer needs to have sex every night to avoid awakening with a headache.

Anxious to accommodate Dino but safeguard his marriage, Orville deliberately provokes an argument with his wife that leads to Zelda fleeing in tears.

He and Barney then arrange for Polly the Pistol, a waitress and prostitute at a saloon on the edge of town called the Belly Button, to pose as Orville's wife and satisfy Dino.

Wilder initially offered the role of Orville Spooner to Jack Lemmon (Farr's real life husband), whom he had directed in Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma la Douce, but prior commitments forced the actor to decline.

[2] In 2002 a print was shown in several U.S. cities containing the originally-shot seduction scene in Polly's trailer (seen in European exhibition), rather than the tamer replacement Wilder has supplied in hope of satisfying the Catholic Legion of Decency.

The movie's use of an unflattering version of Dean Martin ("Dino") was a forerunner of the current trend of celebrities doing comic send-ups of themselves on film.

Bosley Crowther blamed both films for giving American movies the reputation of "deliberate and degenerate corruptors of public taste and morals".

[5] A. H. Weiler of the New York Times called the film "pitifully unfunny" and "obvious, plodding, short on laughs and performances and long on vulgarity."

"[6] The Time review called the film "a jape that seems to have scraped its blue-black humor off the floor of a honky-tonk nightclub" and "professionally shrewd and zippy [with] a kind of vulgar integrity."

It concluded, "The result, spelled out in dialogue that sounds like a series of gamy punch lines, is one of the longest traveling-salesman stories ever committed to film.

Wilder, usually a director of considerable flair and inventiveness (if not always impeccable taste), has not been able this time out to rise above a basically vulgar, as well as creatively delinquent, screenplay, and he has got at best only plodding help from two of his principals, Dean Martin and Kim Novak .

"[8] Michael Scheinfeld of TV Guide rated the film 3½ out of four stars, calling it "a kind of cinematic litmus test that separates the casual Billy Wilder fan from the true connoisseur" and "a monument of satirical tastelessness that .

He observed, "The first half is an unending parade of smutty gags and single entendres, with a few toilet jokes thrown in for good measure.

The constant tumult in the Spooners' cramped bungalow betrays the movie's stage origins, and indeed, Climax itself is an appropriately desolate stage-set.

Kiss Me, Stupid is likely Wilder's harshest view of the American landscape since the orchestrated media feeding frenzy of Ace in the Hole .

Kiss Me, Stupid's mutually redemptive adultery is closer to the grown-up world of John Cassavetes's Faces than to Wilder's adolescent Seven Year Itch — but it's ultimately a more knowingly tolerant, not to mention funnier, movie than either.