Everybody lives by cheating everybody else.
—Preston Sturges
“The first thing you learn in Hollywood,” Billy Wilder declared, was that you must not offend pressure groups. “Don’t offend the Catholics, the Jews, the dentists,” or any other group.1 Wilder forgot his own advice when he made Kiss Me, Stupid, which offended the Catholic Legion of Decency mightily. But in 1963, Wilder was riding high. In the light of the phenomenal success of Irma la Douce, Harold Mirisch, the president of the Mirisch Company, issued Wilder a sweetheart contract that guaranteed him a salary of four hundred thousand dollars plus 10 percent of the gross profit for his next movie.
Wilder selected as the source of his next movie a farce by Italian playwright Anna Bonacci titled L’ora della fantasia (The dazzling hour). Wilder knew the play in its French translation, which had been a big hit on the Paris stage as a vehicle for Jeanne Moreau in 1953. Irma la Douce had also been a success in Paris. Both were naughty boulevard comedies, as Pauline Kael observes.2 So Wilder assumed that his film version of Bonacci’s farce would repeat the success of Irma on the screen.
The French adaptation of Bonacci’s Italian play is set in Victorian England. George Sedley, a village church organist, wants to have his new oratorio performed in London. Sir Ronald, the influential sheriff of London, passes through town. George, at the suggestion of his friend Taylor, invites the sheriff to stay overnight in his home so that George can persuade him to arrange for the London premiere of his oratorio. To ingratiate himself with the sheriff, George arranges to have Geraldine, the village harlot, substitute for his wife, Mary, as Sir Ronald’s companion for the night. As a result of some plot twists, Sir Ronald winds up spending the night with Mary instead of Geraldine. He agrees to sponsor the London performance of her husband’s oratorio in exchange for “one dazzling hour” with Mary. George is astonished later to learn that his oratorio is to be performed in London.
Although the studio had persuaded Wilder to shoot Irma in color, he held out for shooting the present film in black and white. Admittedly, color was in wide use for features by 1963, but Wilder continued to favor black and white. “Unlike David Lean,” who needed color for his epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), “my pictures are set in the bed or under the bed” and do not require color, he glibly explained.3
In adapting the play for the screen, Wilder changed the names of the characters and transplanted the setting from a rural village in Victorian England to a hick town in the American Southwest named Climax, Nevada. George Sedley and his sidekick Taylor are retooled into the frustrated songwriters Orville Spooner and Barney Milsap. Wilder’s first Hollywood screenplay, Music in the Air, featured a songwriting team who served to some degree as the models for Orville and Barney.4
In Wilder’s scenario, piano teacher Orville attempts to sell a song he and Barney wrote to Dino, a famous crooner who is stranded in Climax overnight. Following the play’s plot fairly closely, the screenplay has Orville send his wife Zelda away for the night so that he can have Polly, a prostitute, pose as Zelda and spend the night with Dino. This is all part of Orville’s plot to manipulate Dino into featuring the song on a TV special. But Orville’s plans go awry, and the real Zelda winds up bedding down with the singer—with the understanding that Dino will introduce the song on the air. Throughout the film, Orville is jealous to the point of paranoia of any man who pays attention to his pretty young wife, a trait Wilder retained from his literary source.
I. A. L. Diamond maintained that, in fashioning the script with a spicy plot punctuated with salty double entendres, he and Wilder were aiming to create a movie like Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). Richardson’s film is a loose adaptation of the earthy Henry Fielding novel Tom Jones (1749), a bawdy social satire about the manners and morals of eighteenth-century England. Like the novel, the film is a very honest portrayal of the period. But “we were not interested in doing a picture about greed and sex in Victorian England,” Diamond stated; “we wanted to translate it into modern times.”5
With the script in reasonably good shape, Wilder cast the picture. He went into production with Dean Martin as the crooner Dino, Kim Novak as Polly, and Peter Sellers as Orville. Martin was the first to be cast, since Wilder needed the singer’s assurance that he would not mind that the crooner in the script was modeled after his popular image. Indeed, Martin’s character in the film bears his own nickname, Dino. Martin would be parodying himself in the picture, just as Otto Preminger had done in Stalag 17. “He’s a delicious and adorable man who does what you ask him,” said Wilder of Martin. “He’s one of the most relaxed and talented men I know.”6
As Polly the Pistol, the prostitute who yearns for domesticity, Novak seems to be doing a takeoff on Marilyn Monroe. “Wilder obviously had Marilyn Monroe in mind when he created the character of Polly,” Bernard Dick writes. “Wilder invested Polly with the same sexy vulnerability that made Marilyn tragic and desirable.”7 Novak is quite touching as a Monroe-like wistful floozy. As it happened, Marilyn was Novak’s own first name; it had been changed to Kim by the studio early on to avoid confusion with Monroe.
Wilder envisaged Peter Sellers as Orville Spooner, the jealous husband, because Sellers had the knack of making the most eccentric characters sympathetic to an audience. Felicia Farr, an accomplished actress as well as the wife of Jack Lemmon, rounded out the cast as Orville’s wife Zelda.
Wilder was able to round up the same group of seasoned production artists who had collaborated with him on Irma la Douce. Production designer Alexander Trauner had to create Climax, Nevada, for the movie—a desolate place on the fringe of the Nevada desert, recalling the sun-baked town in Ace in the Hole. Wilder and Trauner scouted locations for Climax on the outskirts of Twenty-nine Palms, a small town near the California desert. They selected suitable sites for the dusty residential neighborhood where Orville lives and for the sleazy Belly Button roadhouse. The tavern is so named because the sign out front, which Trauner constructed outside a real café, features a cartoonish cocktail waitress with a fake jewel conspicuously glittering in her belly button.
Wilder needed a couple of sample songs that were supposedly composed by the team of Orville and Barney. During preproduction he had consulted an old friend, the lyricist Ira Gershwin, about the matter. Ira said that he had a trunk full of songs that he and his brother, the late George Gershwin, had never published. He volunteered to rework a couple of the numbers so that they would sound as if they were written by amateur songwriters. One was “I’m a Poached Egg,” a whimsical ditty that he and George had written in the 1920s and quite rightly discarded. Ira also dusted off a love song titled “Sophia,” which had been dropped from the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie musical Shall We Dance? (1937).
Principal photography on Kiss Me, Stupid began on March 6, 1964. In addition to the location work in Twenty-nine Palms, Wilder filmed some shots of casinos on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. In addition, he shot Dino’s Vegas nightclub act at the swank Moulin Rouge club on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. But the bulk of the picture was filmed, as usual, at the Goldwyn Studios.
Wilder, according to his custom, attempted to minimize the stress level on the set during shooting with wisecracks. In Dean Martin, Wilder met his match when it came to trading verbal punches. Martin always had a comeback for Wilder’s witticisms. When Wilder issued complicated instructions to Martin on how he was to play a particular scene, Martin retorted, “Well, for Chrissakes, if you wanted an actor, what did you hire me for? Why didn’t you go get Marlon Brando?”8 Peter Sellers was not accustomed to incessant banter on the set. Moreover, Wilder preferred an open set and allowed his own friends, as well as guests of the cast and crew, to visit the soundstage during shooting. “The clubby atmosphere made Sellers feel like an outsider,” since he was from Britain, notes Glenn Hopp.9 To make matters worse, other directors permitted Sellers to improvise while rehearsing a scene, but Wilder did not allow any actor to do so.
Sellers kept all of his gripes against Wilder to himself. Nevertheless, the high-strung, erratic actor privately fretted about his resentment of the working conditions on a Wilder set. At night he often sought to assuage his tensions and anxieties by smoking marijuana and sniffing amyl nitrate, a habit that was pushing him toward a crisis.10
The crisis erupted on Sunday evening, April 5, 1964. The thirty-eight-year-old actor—after indulging in a dose of amyl nitrate—suffered a mild heart attack. He was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The following Tuesday, shortly after midnight, Sellers suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and was at death’s door. Miraculously, he survived and was on the road to recovery very soon. The hospital’s heart specialists advised Wilder that Sellers could resume work on Kiss Me, Stupid after six months of convalescence at home in England.11
Wilder sent Sellers a wire, stating, “Your heart is mended; but mine is still broken.”12 Wilder was already a month into the shooting schedule. In six months’ time, the contracts of the other major players in the film would have expired, and they would move on to other projects. Wilder was saddened by the prospect of having to replace Sellers, but he had no choice.
Once he was back in London, Sellers granted Alexander Walker an interview for the Evening Standard, in which he declared, “I have had Hollywood, luv. At the studios they give you every creature comfort, except the satisfaction of being able to get the best work out of yourself. I used to go down to the set of Kiss Me, Stupid with Billy Wilder and find a bloody Cook’s Tour of hangers-on and sightseers standing just off the set, right in my line of vision.” These were friends of the director and the cast “who came to kibitz on Peter Sellers, actor. I should have ridden to the set on horseback and bawled out, ‘Who are all these damn civilians? Get them out of the range of my cannons!’ ”13
Shortly thereafter, Sellers received a cable signed by Wilder, Martin, and Novak: “Talk about unprofessional rat finks!” “Rat fink” was Polly’s description in the script of any boyfriend who had dumped her. Wilder released the telegram to the press with the comment “Heart attack? You have to have a heart before you can have a heart attack!”14
Sellers replied with an open letter, published in Variety, in which he proclaimed that he was not “an ungrateful limey,” much less a “rat fink.” He continued, “I went to Hollywood to work and found regrettably that the creative side of me couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which the work had to be carried out.” He concluded by saying that anyone was free to say that he was the one at fault, “and no doubt will.”15
Wilder decided against replying to Sellers’s latest salvo to put a stop to the interchange. He hastily recast the part of Orville with Ray Walston, who had played one of the randy executives in The Apartment. Wilder began reshooting all of Sellers’s scenes with Walston on April 13. A full twenty-four shooting days out of a total of eighty-five were devoted to retakes with Walston. That inevitably meant that the film would considerably exceed the film’s original schedule and budget.
Wilder later observed that he admired Sellers as an actor, whatever their disagreements. He added ruefully, “We got Ray Walston, who is a fine actor, but no Peter Sellers.”16 Walston was ultimately charmless and unlikable in the role, Axel Madsen comments. Walston often assumes a grim look, “which is meant to express bewilderment, but registers as truculence.”17 One cannot help but wonder how the film would have turned out with Sellers as a more sympathetic Orville.
During postproduction Previn’s background music was recorded. He adroitly integrated into his score themes from the songs that Ira Gershwin had provided. It was time then to send the picture to the industry censor.
Wilder had stopped submitting screenplays to Shurlock in the late 1950s, when Shurlock had advised him that he could not make a solid judgment about a movie on the basis of the script; he could do so only after viewing the finished film. Shurlock thus had no chance to make even a tentative judgment about Kiss Me, Stupid before it was screened for him and his staff. After the film unreeled, writes Jack Vizzard, Shurlock’s chief assistant, Shurlock flabbergasted his advisers, who deemed the movie somewhat crude and tasteless, by announcing, “I’m going to pass it.” He explained, “If this is the kind of movie they want to make; if the companies are going to put up the money for this kind of stuff and then expect me to try and stop them, they’re crazy!”18
The provisions of the censorship code presumed that “motion pictures, unlike stage plays, appeal to mass audiences, the mature and the immature.”19 As Joseph Breen had pointed out to Wilder more than once, “Because motion pictures command a mass audience, material which may be perfectly valid for dramatization and treatment on the stage may be completely unacceptable when presented in a motion picture.”20 What the code was saying was that movies were fundamentally a family medium. Kiss Me, Stupid was definitely not family entertainment, nor could it be retooled into a family film. Shurlock decided to let Wilder’s picture take its chances in the marketplace, and he would observe whether or not the mass audience was prepared to accept a picture with a risqué plot and ribald humor. He proposed to simply wait and see how audiences reacted to Kiss Me, Stupid.
The Legion of Decency took a much dimmer view of Kiss Me, Stupid. Monsignor Little and his staff had been concerned for some time that Hollywood’s output was suffering from a creeping indecency. According to Father Patrick Sullivan, Little was exasperated by the long line of increasingly sleazy movies such as Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964) and Where Love Has Gone (1964). Both movies were based on outré novels by Harold Robbins, whose books could be described as below the belt and beneath discussion. Furthermore, Little believed that in recent years Wilder films like Irma la Douce had been stretching the limits. With Kiss Me, Stupid, Little was convinced, Wilder had finally crashed and burned. In Little’s view, Kiss Me, Stupid was about as sophisticated as a burlesque show. Little was determined to make an example of the film by taking a harsh stance toward it.21
Little accordingly submitted a list of offensive material to Wilder. For example, Polly’s pet parrot, which is fascinated by TV Westerns, often snaps, “Bang, bang!” when Polly brings a customer into her mobile home. Moreover, when Orville shows Polly around his home, he comments, “You’ll like it; it’s not very big, but it’s clean.” Polly inquires suspiciously, “What is?” It was clear, said Little, “that Orville was not talking about his house.” In addition, Dino tells Orville that he would like to go out in the garden with Zelda so “she can show me her parsley.” When Wilder noted that the legion found this line suggestive, he commented with feigned innocence, “What do they want? Broccoli?”22 Little and his staff also objected to some visual gags, such as the huge, phallic cactus plants in Orville’s front yard.
Wilder took an unprecedented step for a film director by having a conference with Little. He informed Little personally that he would make some of the suggested alterations, as a gesture of his goodwill. He warned that, because the sets had already been dismantled, he could not do some of the retakes that Little had asked for. The scene in Polly’s trailer, however, in which Dino has a rendezvous with Zelda, could be redone because it involved a small set, and Dean Martin and Felicia Farr were available to reshoot it.
In the trailer scene as originally filmed, Zelda goes to bed with Dino in return for his promise to plug one of her husband’s songs on TV. The scene fades out with Dino and Zelda lying on the bed and kissing passionately, leaving no doubt that they will have intercourse. Wilder had quipped to one of the crew that a director was not responsible for what the characters did after the scene faded out. But Little thought otherwise.
The revamped scene concludes with Dino falling asleep on the bed while Zelda gives him a back massage. The following morning Dino creeps out of the trailer while Zelda is still asleep—after leaving five hundred dollars on the night table. Zelda’s bare shoulders are visible above the bedcovers, so the money is presumably for services rendered. But the implications of the scene are left to the viewer’s imagination.
Harold Mirisch recalled that Wilder tried his best to placate the legion. “We made a lot of changes, but they insisted on more of them. We couldn’t do them,” because Kim Novak was no longer available for retakes.23 At the end of the day, the legion assigned Kiss Me, Stupid a condemned rating. This was the first condemnation of a mainstream Hollywood feature since Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll in 1956.24 Baby Doll centers on the voluptuous young wife of a seedy cotton gin owner many years her senior.
The legion’s official press release announcing the condemnation of Kiss Me, Stupid began by recalling that “Mr. Wilder’s earlier film The Apartment was an example of effective comic satire, ‘with redeeming social value’ ”—a term the legion had picked up from the Supreme Court’s statements about controversial films. “In the case of Kiss Me, Stupid, however, not only has Mr. Wilder failed to create a genuine satire out of situation comedy, but he has regrettably produced a thoroughly sordid piece of realism, which is aesthetically as well as morally repulsive. Crude and suggestive dialogue, a leering treatment of marital and extra-marital sex, and a prurient preoccupation with lechery compound the film’s bald condonation of immorality.” The legion’s broadside also pointed out that “the release of this film during the holiday season . . . is a commercial decision bereft of respect for the Judaeo-Christian sensibilities of the majority of the American people.”25 Harold Mirisch replied to Little that it was too late to postpone the movie’s release on December 18, 1964.
The legion’s news release wound up with one final blast, this time at Shurlock’s office. It noted “with astonishment” that a film “so patently indecent and immoral” should have received the censorship code’s seal of approval.26 Shurlock responded to Little with the same reason he had given for issuing a code seal for Irma la Douce: he did so on condition that the movie’s trailer and ad layouts would contain the warning “This picture is for adults only.” The legion’s public criticism of Shurlock’s office made it abundantly clear that Shurlock and Little were “singing from different hymnals,” notes Thomas Doherty. That the industry censor was prepared to grant a code seal to pictures like Kiss Me, Stupid “led to an acrimonious divorce between the two senior partners of Hollywood censorship.”27
Once the legion had condemned Kiss Me, Stupid, UA, uneasy about public criticism, “turned the picture over with as little fuss as possible to its subsidiary,” Lopert Pictures, for U.S. distribution.28 Lopert specialized in foreign films released on the art house circuit. That automatically resulted in a more limited distribution for Kiss Me, Stupid than UA normally would have provided for a major release.
Wilder had one sneak preview for the movie in New York City and another in Los Angeles in November 1964. In both instances, several audience response cards complained about the more raucous jokes in the picture. Wilder gradually was coming to realize, however, that there was a limit to how much cosmetic surgery one could perform on a film. All he could do at this juncture was to wait and see how the reviewers reacted when the movie opened on December 18—at yuletide, no less.
The opening credits of Kiss Me, Stupid begin with a shot of the Vegas Strip, then move on to the marquee of the Sands Hotel, announcing Dino’s appearance there. Then Wilder cuts to the Copa Room, where Dino is performing his nightclub act, surrounded by a bevy of bosomy chorus girls. The crooner points to one of the befeathered chorines and says, “Last night she was banging on my bedroom door for forty-five minutes; I wouldn’t let her out!” That bit of saucy wit sets the tone of the humor in the rest of the movie.
Dino departs from Vegas the next day in his Italian sports car, headed for Los Angeles, where he is to tape a TV special. He develops car trouble on the outskirts of the desert town of Climax, Nevada. His car is hauled into town by a tow truck while he sits behind the steering wheel as if he were driving. The local gas station attendant, Barney Milsap (Cliff Osmond), recognizes Dino and immediately gets in touch with his songwriting partner, Orville Spooner, the local piano teacher. Together they concoct a conspiracy to keep Dino in town overnight so he can hear some of their songs. The duplicitous Barney informs Dino that he cannot repair his auto, a foreign make he is not familiar with, until the following day. Orville, according to plan, invites Dino to spend the night at his house, where Orville can perform some of the tunes he has composed, with Barney’s lyrics.
Orville is pathologically jealous of his young wife Zelda. In fact, he goes ballistic when he suspects fourteen-year-old Johnnie Mulligan, one of his piano pupils, of having a crush on his wife. Orville suddenly turns on Johnnie and accuses him of being a “male Lolita.” While they tussle, Orville tears the boy’s shirt off. As he chases the bare-chested youngster around the room, the scene takes on an unwarranted hint of homoeroticism.
Barney and Orville later practice one of the songs they hope to sell Dino on. Orville accompanies Barney as he warbles “I’m a Poached Egg”:
I’m a poached egg without a piece of toast;
I’m a haunted house that doesn’t have a ghost;
I’m da Vinci without the Mona Lis’;
I’m Vienna without the Viennese,
When I’m without you.
Ira Gershwin deliberately made the second rhyme awkward to indicate that, in the story, the lyric is by an amateur.
Orville is aware that the lecherous crooner will listen to the songs only on the condition that Orville provide him with companionship for the night. He hastily pushes a dressmaker’s dummy of his wife out of sight, indicating with a single gesture that his curvaceous wife Zelda is not going to be the target of Dino’s roving eye. Orville sends his wife packing before Dino arrives at the house. He then hires Polly the Pistol, a full-time cocktail waitress and part-time hooker from the Belly Button roadhouse, to pose as his wife—and serve as Dino’s companion for the night.
When Orville plays “Sophia” for Dino, the singer exclaims, “I need another Italian love song like a giraffe needs strep throat!” Still, “Sophia” is a definite improvement over “I’m a Poached Egg”:
Listen to me, Sophia, have you any idea
How much you mean to me-ah?
Sweet Sophia be mine,
Or from the earth I resign!
In due course Dino makes a pass at Polly, and Orville becomes jealous in spite of himself. He behaves like a protective husband, hollering, “Do you think you can buy my wife for a song?” He slugs Dino and kicks him bodily out of the house. (Hence Wilder’s comment that Kiss Me, Stupid is a chaste film that reflects the sanctity of marriage.) Polly is deeply touched by Orville’s solicitude for her.
Meanwhile, Zelda, who is not part of Orville’s conspiracy to sell a song to Dino, whiles away the evening at the Belly Button tavern, getting tipsy. Big Bertha, the madam of the party girls available at the café, puts Zelda to bed in Polly’s trailer, which is next door to the roadhouse. When Dino appears at the café, looking for action, the obliging bartender directs him to Polly’s mobile home. Dino hopes to “shoot it out” with Polly the Pistol. Dino finds Zelda in the trailer and assumes she is Polly; Zelda does not tell him otherwise. This is a typical case of mistaken identity, so common in boulevard comedy. Polly’s parrot greets Dino with a shout, “Bang! Bang!” to which Dino retorts, “No coaching from the audience!” The double entendres come thick and fast in this movie. Zelda proceeds to talk Dino into plugging “Sophia” on TV in exchange for some lovemaking. Meanwhile, back at the Spooner residence, Orville tenderly takes the real Polly, who is wistful for domesticity and enjoys pretending to be Mrs. Spooner, to bed.
One night a few weeks later, Orville and Zelda are watching a color television set in the local TV store’s show window, along with other citizens who do not own a color set. Orville is dumbfounded to hear Dino launch into “Sophia” on national TV. The bewildered Orville turns to his wife and wonders out loud how this could have happened. Zelda gives him an enigmatic smile and says, “Kiss me, stupid!” Previn pours on a lushly orchestrated version of “Sophia,” which carries over into the closing credits.
When the movie opened on December 18, 1964, most reviews were negative. Some critics had virtually nothing good to say about the picture. One reviewer sneered, “For Wilder, love is a four-letter word.”29 Life magazine had often been amiable toward Wilder’s pictures in the past, but Thomas Thompson’s review of Kiss Me, Stupid called the movie “a titanic dirty joke.” He continued, “For years Billy Wilder has walked the shaky tightrope between sophistication and salaciousness; but with Kiss Me, Stupid he has fallen off with a resounding crash.”30 Time deemed the picture “one of the longest traveling salesman stories ever committed to film.”31 Variety noted, “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.”32
Billy Wilder and William Wyler had maintained a long-standing pact whereby each would accept the praise or blame for a movie the other had made, rather than endeavoring to clear up the confusion about their names. When Kiss Me, Stupid received a barrage of negative reviews, however, Wyler phoned Wilder and said, “All bets are off! I am not going to allow anyone to assume that I made Kiss Me, Stupid!” Wyler said he meant his remark as a joke, but Wilder was not amused.33
The single notice that gave Wilder and his picture unstinting praise came from novelist-screenwriter Joan Didion, film critic for Vogue. “Kiss Me, Stupid is suffused with the despair of an America many of us prefer not to know, . . . as witnessed by the number of people who walk out on it.” There is “the desolate glare of Las Vegas; the aridity of the desert; a small town where gasoline station attendants dream of hitting the gold record, the jackpot they will never make at the slots; and cocktail waitresses who work in sleazy bars.” Didion concluded, “In its feelings for such a world, for such a condition of the heart, Kiss Me, Stupid is quite a compelling and moving picture.”34 Didion was the wife of novelist-screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, who titled his career essay on Wilder “The Old Pornographer.” The title is a reference to the note Wilder sent to Didion in appreciation of her review. “I read your piece in the beauty parlor while sitting under the hair dryer; and it sure did the old pornographer’s heart good. Cheers!”35
The film flopped at the box office, “but its failure was ultimately due to the host of negative reviews,” not the legion’s condemnation, as censorship expert Frank Walsh notes.36 “The movie was a dog,” said Wilder stoically; “with Sellers it would have been 5% better.”37
Nevertheless, Wilder’s gaudy, bawdy film boasts a bravura performance by Dean Martin; he is the polished, slicked-down, self-assured embodiment of male sexuality. The movie is like a grind house picture made for the art house trade. “The pursuit of sex and money is always a major impulse in Wilder’s movies, but here it becomes all-consuming,” writes George Morris. “Wilder is appalled by Orville’s sexual and pecuniary machinations,” Morris continues, “but he can laugh at him because he understands Orville’s petty dreams.”38
Diamond contended that Kiss Me, Stupid was as moral as a preacher’s Sunday sermon: “It is a cautionary tale—a jealous husband goes to such extremes to protect his wife’s virtue that she winds up losing it.” Diamond remembered that he and Wilder were consoled “by the great reviews the movie got in London and Paris.” The British and French reviewers saw the picture as a stinging social satire. As the tale of a city slicker outwitted by a country bumpkin, it was Tom Jones in modern dress. “They understood what we were aiming at,” said Diamond.39
Since the movie was blasted by American critics and ignored by American audiences, it was released only a short while in the United States and was seldom revived. Not surprisingly, Kiss Me, Stupid failed to recoup its $2 million production cost. “Okay, I made a bad picture,” Wilder conceded; “but why the indignation, why the charges that I had undermined the nation’s morals?” He added, “They were going to tear up my citizenship papers!”40
Over the years, Wilder did defend himself for making Kiss Me, Stupid whenever it was dismissed as a vulgar film. “This question of bad taste has followed me for years,” he told me. He continued,
When I made Kiss Me, Stupid the film was severely criticized. Yet I always thought that it had some tenderness in its treatment, at least in the scenes between the café girl and the husband who asks her to masquerade as his wife for an evening. This is the only taste of domesticity that she has ever experienced in her whole life and she is very touched by it. But no one seemed to see this aspect of the story.
In any event the film caused a big scandal. Today Kiss Me, Stupid would seem like Disney fare, and I wonder what all the screaming was about.
Wilder was devastated by the hostile reception of his movie in 1964. Fair-weather friends in the film colony avoided him. “When I was lying in the gutter,” he recalled bitterly, “a number of people came along and administered a kick in the groin.”41 In this period of depression and self-doubt, Wilder fled with his wife Audrey to a spa in Badgastein, Austria. This time he stayed several months, taking stock of his career; he subsequently referred to this period as his “year of hibernation.” He had retired to the resort, he confessed later, to lick his wounds and to put thoughts of suicide out of his mind. “I thought of killing myself because I thought I would never make another movie.”42
There was a beautiful waterfall at Badgastein, which prompted him to recall the Berlin apartment he had lived in when he was trying to break into the movie business in the 1920s. He could hear the water running in the leaky toilet in the restroom next to his tawdry room all night. “I’d imagine it was a beautiful waterfall, just to get my mind off the monotony of it.” When he was taking the cure at Badgastein, “There I was in bed at night, listening to the waterfall; and all I could think of was that goddamned toilet! And that, like the man says, is the story of my life.”43
At all events, Wilder’s fears that he would never make another picture for the Mirisch Company or anyone else proved groundless. Five months after the disastrous opening of Kiss Me, Stupid, Harold Mirisch renewed Wilder’s contract.
After all, Kiss Me, Stupid was viewed in Europe not as a prurient movie but as a film aimed at thoughtful adults. When one sees Kiss Me, Stupid today, now that the controversy has died down, one can see that it is a knockabout farce; that is all that it ever was. Wilder’s films in the early 1960s, taken together, were landmark movies that set a trend toward more adult subject matter on the screen.
When Wilder returned from his extended stay at Badgastein, he began meeting daily with Iz Diamond in their cluttered office on the Goldwyn lot. But their discussions did not yield any viable ideas for a screenplay. Sometimes they would just sit in sullen silence for long periods of time; the phone did not even ring. But Wilder’s sense of humor gradually returned. He joked that, for the first time in living memory, he received no phone calls requesting him to be a pallbearer. “In Hollywood you only want people with hit pictures to haul your coffin,” he explained with mock solemnity.44
One afternoon Ernest Lehman, with whom Wilder had cowritten Sabrina, wandered into the office. He observed that Wilder was losing weight and smoking too much. He inquired how Wilder and Diamond were getting on with a new project. Wilder replied that they felt like parents who had produced a defective child. “Now we keep asking ourselves, ‘Do we dare screw again?’ ”45
After three months of spinning his wheels, the ideas started flowing again. Wilder told a journalist that he realized that he had spent too much time analyzing and rethinking his failure. “All that self-torture is a waste of time; I’m already preparing another failure!”46 He got the inspiration for a new movie while watching a football game on TV. When a husky fullback ran out of bounds with the ball, he wound up falling on a spectator on the sidelines. “That’s a movie,” Wilder muttered to himself, “and the guy underneath is Lemmon.”47 From this incident he and Diamond developed a scenario called The Fortune Cookie, about Harry Hinkle, a TV cameraman accidentally knocked cold by a football player, Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson, during a game. Harry allows his brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, a crooked lawyer, to lure him into filing a fraudulent insurance claim to acquire the fortune he needs to win back his greedy ex-wife. Walter Mirisch had faith in Wilder and green-lighted the new project with a budget of $3.7 million.
The Fortune Cookie is the first of three Wilder films that are linked by an exploration of male friendship. The other two are The Front Page and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. In the first of the three films, Wilder applied a tongue-in-cheek approach to a subject that he had already examined with deadly seriousness in Double Indemnity: the gentle art of cheating an insurance company. The Apartment also involves an insurance company. In fact, the company that employs Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in The Apartment is the very same insurance company that Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon again) hopes to swindle in The Fortune Cookie.
The crucial piece of casting for the present film was the role of Willie Gingrich, the shyster lawyer. Walter Matthau immediately came to Wilder’s mind. While Wilder was preparing The Fortune Cookie, Matthau scored a major stage triumph as a sloppy, dyspeptic individual sharing a bachelor flat with another man in The Odd Couple, which made him a Broadway star and got him national press attention. Like James Cagney, Matthau was a product of New York’s Lower East Side and could play a tough customer with a gruff voice like Willie Gingrich convincingly. Wilder saw Matthau as an up-and-comer and thought the part of Willie would jump-start his movie career. In fact, Wilder would write the part with Matthau in mind, just as he had written the role of Sir Wilfrid in Witness for the Prosecution specifically for Charles Laughton.
“Before we put a word on paper,” Diamond remembered, “we went to New York to see Mr. Matthau.”48 After Wilder recounted the plot of The Fortune Cookie for Matthau, the actor said he would like to see the script. Wilder answered that there was no script as yet. Matthau, who wanted very much to work with Wilder, responded, “Okay, who needs a script? I’ll do it!”49
Matthau was sometimes asked whether he modeled his portrayal of Willie Gingrich, a glib, cynical type, on Wilder. His reply: “I always play Wilder in a Wilder picture; Wilder sees me as Wilder! That is, Billy sees me as a loveable rogue, a scalawag like himself.”50 Indeed, Willie is described in the screenplay as having “a brain full of razor blades,” a phrase coined by William Holden about Wilder.51
In The Fortune Cookie, Wilder paired Matthau with Lemmon for the first time. The comic duo would appear in two more Wilder pictures and in films made by other directors as well, such as the screen version of The Odd Couple (1968). Jack Lemmon’s son Chris writes that “Pop and Walter developed an immediate friendship on The Fortune Cookie.”52
After Matthau and Lemmon were cast, Wilder and Diamond set to work on the script. The Fortune Cookie is their most structured screenplay. It is divided into sixteen segments, each introduced on screen with a catchy title: “The Caper,” “The Taste of Money,” and so on. The titles are reminiscent of a TV miniseries in which the plot unfolds in individual episodes, each with a clever title.
The script’s first episode is titled “The Accident.” When grid star Boom Boom Jackson runs out of bounds with the football, he accidentally flattens TV cameraman Harry Hinkle, who is standing on the sidelines. Wilder, we know, was a stickler for authenticity in his films. With his customary thirst for realism, he staged the accident during a real professional football game between the Cleveland Browns, Boom Boom’s team, and the Minnesota Vikings. Harry is employed by CBS-TV, and the game is played at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. No fictitious names for Wilder.
The screenplay displays flashes of the sharp wit that indicated that Wilder and Diamond were back on track. In the episode titled “The Brother-in-Law,” for example, Willie shows up at St. Mark’s Hospital looking very much like a shady grifter in his seedy tweed coat and battered fedora. Willie donates a dime to the collection box for unmarried mothers, a charitable cause of the nuns who operate the hospital. “Unwed mothers? I’m for that!” he says with a leer. Shortly after, Willie needs a dime to phone the Cleveland Plain Dealer with his hot tip that he is suing CBS-TV, the Browns, and the stadium for $1 million. An inveterate chiseler, Willie sneaks back to the collection box and retrieves the dime to make the phone call. Morris sees this irreverent gag as one example of how Wilder’s wit in The Fortune Cookie at times seems as corrosive as that in Ace in the Hole. Morris writes that throughout the movie Wilder goes for the jugular as he launches “an unrelieved attack on human rapacity and corruption, as epitomized in Willie Gingrich.”53 Kevin Lally takes Willie less seriously; he sees him as “an engaging scoundrel, . . . always on the lookout for a crooked new angle.”54
In filling out the supporting cast of the movie during preproduction, Wilder demonstrated once more his sharp eye for good character actors. He picked Ned Glass (the storekeeper in West Side Story) to play Doc Schindler, a veterinarian on parole for doping a racehorse. Willie instructs the doc to inject Harry with a shot of Novocain so that he will be numb when he is examined by the team of physicians representing Consolidated Life. One of the insurance company’s consultants, Professor Winterhalter, is played by none other than Sig Ruman. Winterhalter from Vienna is another of Wilder’s pixilated Freudian psychiatrists. He recalls that, “in the old days, when a man claimed paralysis, we threw him in the snake pit; if he climbed out, we knew he was lying.” When one of the doctors asks Winterhalter for his learned opinion about Harry’s claims, he replies succinctly, “Fake!” But he is outnumbered by the physicians who have been taken in by Harry’s phony injuries.
A number of artists behind the camera had, like Sig Ruman, been associated with other Wilder pictures: supervising editor Doane Harrison, film editor Daniel Mandell, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, and composer André Previn. As things turned out, all of them were collaborating with Wilder for the last time.
The Fortune Cookie was LaShelle’s fourth film for Wilder; three of them, The Apartment, Kiss Me, Stupid, and the present film, were photographed in black and white. In each of these pictures, LaShelle masterfully filmed the drab living quarters of the hero in unsparing detail. Wilder admired LaShelle as an experienced cameraman, “but he was on the verge of retirement” and did in fact retire two years later.55 By coincidence, LaShelle left Wilder’s production team after shooting Wilder’s last black-and-white film. In the age of color television, a feature film had to be made in color to be broadcast in prime time. So not even Wilder could hold out any longer.
Principal photography for The Fortune Cookie commenced on October 31, 1965, with location filming in Cleveland. For the opening sequence, shot during the Browns-Vikings game, the script called for “a gloomy, bonechilling day.”56 The weather during the game was made to order; it was a cold, gray Sunday. Wilder had three cameras strategically stationed around the stadium to cover the action on the field. In the course of the game, a Browns halfback executed a spectacular run down the field. Wilder arranged with the Browns’ owner, Art Modell, to have halfback Ernie Green repeat the run the following day so that he could film the sequence in which Boom Boom is knocked out of bounds and plows into Harry.
Accordingly, on Monday, some of the Browns—some wearing their own uniforms, others dressed as Vikings—took to the field, where Green made a mad dash with the ball. Wilder hollered “Cut!” and substituted one stunt man for Green and another for Jack Lemmon at the point where Boom Boom was to crash into Harry. Lemmon’s stunt man reeled backward and landed on his back on a pile of mattresses covered with fake grass. While the scene was being filmed, Wilder stood next to the camera, puffing on a cigarette and barking commands like a top sergeant at the players and the camera crew.
Finally, on Tuesday, ten thousand extras showed up to fill the stands, lured by the raffling off of a sports car and a trip to Hollywood. Wilder needed them to stand up and cheer wildly for Boom Boom as he ran down the field. A press conference was held at which a studio press agent announced that the call for extras was the largest in Hollywood history. Wilder told the reporters present, “After my last picture I know how Modell feels” about the Browns’ losing Sunday’s game. “But he shouldn’t worry. There’ll be further disasters.”57
After finishing location work in Cleveland, the film unit returned to Hollywood to shoot interiors at the Goldwyn Studios. Matthau developed a good working relationship with Wilder from the outset. On Matthau’s first day on the set, Wilder gave Matthau, in his heavy German accent, a complicated set of directions for playing a scene. Matthau respectfully listened in silence and then inquired, “You speak kind of funny; you from out of town?” Matthau asked Lemmon, “Why are you doing this film? I have the best part.” Lemmon replied, “Don’t you think it’s about time?”58 Lemmon’s point was that he was already a movie star by the time he made The Fortune Cookie, whereas Matthau was only now getting a role in pictures that would afford him his big break.
Matthau obviously had the stronger role; it was difficult for Lemmon to be funny when he spent the majority of the movie in a wheelchair. Nevertheless, Lemmon took center stage whenever the script offered him the opportunity. When Harry eagerly anticipates the return of his estranged wife, Sandi, he puts on a phonograph record of Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” and spins around the room in a kind of wheelchair ballet. Wilder utilized the wide-screen format skillfully by holding the camera stationary and allowing Lemmon to careen around the room. Lemmon roamed from one side of the screen to the other, sometimes even disappearing momentarily from the frame. This lack of perfect pictorial composition made the scene more dynamic and spontaneous. Surprisingly, Lemmon’s virtuoso ballet was accomplished in a single take.
Still, Wilder was concerned that Lemmon’s performance was going to be overshadowed by Matthau’s showier role. During the production period, Wilder did all he could to bolster Lemmon’s part, including highlighting the wheelchair ballet. He also wrote some additional dialogue for Lemmon to give him more screen time.
Wilder’s facetious prediction at the Cleveland press conference came to pass when, after nearly two months of filming on the Goldwyn lot, Walter Matthau suffered a heart attack. But there was no question of Wilder’s replacing Matthau, as had happened with Peter Sellers on Kiss Me, Stupid. There were only ten days left in the shooting schedule of The Fortune Cookie, so of course Wilder opted to wait for Matthau to recover before completing principal photography. Walter Mirisch writes that the “cast insurance policy” paid the costs of holding on to the cast members “until production could be resumed.” Wilder had to shut down production for two months, so shooting did not wrap until February 1966.59
The last shot of Matthau that Wilder filmed before suspending production showed Willie rushing up the stairs to Harry’s apartment with a settlement check from Consolidated Life. The first shot of Matthau that Wilder made when filming resumed showed Willie entering Harry’s apartment with the check. But Matthau had lost weight during his convalescence. “You see me going upstairs weighing 198 pounds,” he recalled. “I walk in the apartment and I’m 160 pounds.” But the audience never noticed this discrepancy. “Billy told me to act heavier,” Matthau explained.60 In fact, Matthau was wearing an overcoat when he went into the apartment; the coat helped to conceal that Matthau had gotten thinner.
When Wilder screened the final cut of The Fortune Cookie for UA, the studio brass had one complaint: they judged the movie’s title to be weak. Ever since Paramount temporarily altered the title of Ace in the Hole to The Big Carnival without Wilder’s consent, however, he had it stipulated in his contract that the titles of the U.S. release prints of his movies could not be changed without his approval. UA was free, however, to retitle the picture for the British market, and it did so, calling it Meet Whiplash Willie.
Wilder set up a sneak preview of the movie in Westwood, his favorite neighborhood for a sneak, in June 1966. Diamond and Lemmon were on hand. Wilder told them that, before the picture started, he was going to wipe his brow “and say a few prayers.” He watched the movie with the audience intermittently, when he was not pacing nervously in the theater lobby. “Do they care, the audience in there? Are they interested?”61 Wilder said that he always asked himself those questions during previews of his pictures. He explained, “For me there are only two types of movies, interesting movies and boring movies. It’s as simple as that. Does a film rivet my attention, so that I drop my box of popcorn and become part of what is happening on the screen, or doesn’t it? If a film engages my interest only sporadically, the picture just hasn’t got it.”
After the preview of The Fortune Cookie, Wilder felt that the audience’s reaction, as reflected in the preview cards, was fairly positive. Still, he decided to make a couple of minor adjustments: He cut three minutes of “excess baggage,” that is, superfluous dialogue. He also asked Previn to replace the waltz music that accompanied Harry and Boom Boom tossing a football around the empty stadium at the fade-out with a rousing march played by a brass band. Also, because “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” already figured prominently in the background music, Previn employed the tune to accompany the opening credits, orchestrated with an old-fashioned big band sound.
The film’s first episode, “The Accident,” concludes with Harry being carted off the playing field on a stretcher. He is on his way to St. Mark’s Hospital, where he will be attended by nursing sisters. Diamond quipped that, to appease the legion, instead of having hookers, as in Wilder’s two previous movies, “we have nuns in this one!”62
“The Brother-in-Law,” the next episode, begins with Whiplash Willie Gingrich, an ambulance-chasing lawyer, keeping vigil next to Harry’s hospital bed. The wily, unscrupulous Willie is a grotesque figure straight out of Dickens. Matthau’s performance as a hoax-peddling fraud is marked by ticks and funny vocal inflections. Willie earned his nickname because he specializes in turning whiplash cases into lucrative lawsuits. And so he badgers Harry into exaggerating his injuries to extort a hefty sum of money from the insurance company. “We’re going for all the marbles, kid,” Willie assures Harry with maniacal glee. Despite serious misgivings, Harry goes along with Willie’s crooked scheme. Willie reassures him, “The insurance company is loaded; they will take our payoff out of petty cash!” He adds, “We’re in this together—straight down the line.” This is precisely what Walter says to Phyllis when they finalize their scheme to bilk the insurance company in Double Indemnity.
“The motives underlying this Wilderian deception are exceptionally base,” Morris writes.63 Harry agrees to the swindle only because Willie convinces him that his estranged wife, Sandy (Judi West), will be reconciled with him once he comes into a great sum of money. Harry and Sandy were married on the Fourth of July. Ironically, that was the day Harry lost his independence—he remains emotionally dependent on his erstwhile wife, though she dumped him for a failed musician.
In reality, Sandy is no prize. For one thing, she is not very bright. Sandy has read only one book—The Carpetbaggers. But she never got past page 19 because she found the trashy novel too sophisticated. Nevertheless, Harry wants her back. When Willie talks on the phone to Sandy in New York, Wilder adroitly uses the wide-screen format to reveal Sandy’s true character. We see Sandy on the left side of the screen as she talks to Willie; she is wearing a tawdry negligee. On the right side of the screen, a naked man is asleep in a disheveled bed. As Sandy is described in the screenplay, she does not have much class, but “there is something very provocative about her.”64
Sandy agrees to come to Cleveland, ostensibly to care for Harry, but the mercenary female actually covets her share of the insurance settlement. She has confidence in Willie as a shyster lawyer. “Willie,” she later comments, “could find a loophole in the Ten Commandments.”
Boom Boom (Ron Rich) is distraught when he hears that Harry is seriously injured and, for the time being, confined to a wheelchair. To make amends, he becomes Harry’s caretaker once he is released from the hospital, so it is Boom Boom—not Sandy—who becomes Harry’s nursemaid. The two men gradually become fast friends. Consequently, Harry develops severe scruples about inflicting a specious burden of guilt on Boom Boom.
It is significant that Wilder released The Fortune Cookie in 1966, when the civil rights movement was going strong, epitomized by demonstrations for racial equality led by Martin Luther King Jr. (after whom Wilder named Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson). The African American Boom Boom is one of the very few honest individuals in the picture. British critic Frieda Lockhart comments that “the Negro footballer is too good to be true.”65 Actually, it seems that Wilder conceived Boom Boom as a contrast to Willie. Indeed, Harry’s conversations with Boom Boom serve to balance his encounters with Willie. As Steve Seidman puts it, Boom Boom functions as the “good conscience” figure in Harry, while Willie functions as his “bad conscience” figure. This proves to be a very effective way of dramatizing Harry’s inner conflict on the screen.66
Meanwhile, a trio of lawyers representing Consolidated Life, known as the Legal Eagles, engage Chester Purkey (Cliff Osmond), a dogged private eye and surveillance expert, to keep tabs on Harry. “The ‘respectable’ insurance firm’s methods, including bugging their opponent’s apartment, are almost as nasty as Whiplash Willie’s tactics,” writes Lockhart.67 The private detective, sneaking around in his cheap raincoat with his hidden microphones and cameras, poking clandestinely “into the most intimate activities and conversations,” Stephen Farber states, “is the most repulsive character in the film.”68
The Legal Eagles eventually decide to settle Harry’s claim with a check for two hundred thousand dollars rather than face the endless courtroom battle Willie has threatened them with. But Purkey, like a crafty card sharp, has one last wild card up his sleeve. When he goes to Harry’s apartment to collect his surveillance equipment, he makes calculated racial slurs about Boom Boom. He observes, “What gets me is, I’m driving an old Chevy; and I see a coon riding around in a white Cadillac.” Harry, furious, finally gives the game away by rising from his wheelchair to slug Purkey. For good measure, Harry decides to sock Purkey again, so he shouts to Purkey’s cameraman in the apartment across the street, “Roll ’em, Max!” This is Wilder’s reference to the last sequence of Sunset Boulevard, in which Max is directing the newsreel cameramen who are photographing Norma. Undaunted, Willie informs Purkey that he plans to sue him for his racist remarks on behalf of the NAACP. Moreover, having realized at long last that the self-serving Sandy’s concern for him was motivated solely by money, Harry kicks his ex-wife out the door.
At this point, the viewer might recall the fortune cookie that Harry opened earlier in the film. Its message quoted Abraham Lincoln’s dictum, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Once again, Wilder was criticized for sweetening his bitter brew by providing a film with an unwarranted upbeat ending, whereby Harry experiences a sense of moral regeneration just when the insurance payoff is within his grasp. Louis Giannetti has a thought-provoking response to this objection. He reminds us that many of Wilder’s films are about morally weak individuals like Harry who return to the path of virtue by film’s end. “But in Wilder’s world,” he adds, “virtue must be its own reward.” Wilder’s characters might manage to save their self-respect—but that is all they salvage. “The spoils of their calculations are reluctantly sacrificed when they decide to give up their schemes,” as when Harry blows the whistle on the insurance fraud. Therefore the ending of The Fortune Cookie, like that of The Apartment, is less positive than it might appear.69
Wilder himself responded to those critics he termed “Jack the Rippers,” who claimed that the “shower bath of sentiment” at the film’s end was a concession to the box office. He explained that he wanted to give the audience “a little bonus at the end,” because “it would have been dismally depressing otherwise.”70
Once Harry is able to reject his scheming brother-in-law, he reverts to his kind and honest nature.71 In the film’s epilogue, titled “The Final Score,” Harry goes looking for Boom Boom to make amends for the anguish he has caused his pal. Harry locates him in the deserted football stadium. After Harry apologizes, the pair reaffirm their comradeship by contentedly tossing a football back and forth like a couple of adolescent boys. Wilder makes the same point with Harry and Boom Boom’s impromptu game of touch football that he made with Bud and Fran’s gin rummy game at the conclusion of The Apartment: it is easier to play the game of life with someone else than to have to go it alone. So the final line of The Fortune Cookie is Harry’s shout, “Come on, play ball!” as the game of life goes on.
Dick notes that “the basic decency of Harry and Boom Boom contrasts sharply with the mendacity of Harry’s ex-wife Sandy and his brother-in-law Willie.” Little wonder, then, that at film’s end Harry “seeks out the only person who has not sunk into the bogs of greed—Boom Boom.”72 Wilder’s interest in male bonding in his movies goes back to Walter Neff and Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity and Sefton and Cookie in Stalag 17. But Farber declares that “homosexuality plays a furtive role in a number of Wilder’s films,” including The Fortune Cookie.73 Homosexuality does surface in some of Wilder’s films, but The Fortune Cookie is not one of them. To find homosexuality in this picture is to underestimate the value Wilder places on male friendship in his films.
The Fortune Cookie opened in theaters across the country on October 19, 1966, to largely favorable notices and good box office returns. Critics noted the laugh-a-minute repartee peppered with the bitter satirical asides that distinguish Wilder’s work. The fundamentally positive reception of the film went a long way in aiding Wilder to put the fiasco of Kiss Me, Stupid behind him.
Richard Schickel found the film a wily morality tale about chicanery and deception, punctuated with Wilder’s customary corrosive wit: “A jackhammer of a film, savagely applied to those concrete areas of the human spirit where cupidity and stupidity have been so long entrenched; it is a bitterly, often excruciatingly funny movie.” Wilder, he continued, “is just about the only American director of comedy who finds his material in the artful exaggeration of all-too-recognizable human and social traits. He has a cold rather than a warm comic spirit. . . . If you can stand the chill, I think you’ll find plenty of truth in what he has to say.” In his unqualified rave, Schickel called Matthau “the W. C. Fields of the 1960s,” noting that he shared with Fields “an undeniably comic orneriness.”74 Matthau indeed steals the picture in an act of the grandest larceny, and he won an Academy Award for his role as the conniving Willie.
Wilder brought in The Fortune Cookie $5,000 over budget, but the Mirisch brothers did not complain. After all, the movie grossed $5 million domestically, with an additional $1.8 million coming from overseas; the film’s profit was double that of its cost.
Wilder was relieved that he experienced no censorship problems with The Fortune Cookie. As it happened, Monsignor Little, his nemesis all the way back to The Seven Year Itch, retired in 1966 and was replaced by his executive assistant, Father Patrick Sullivan. Shortly after his appointment, in a press release dated December 8, 1965, Sullivan proclaimed that the Legion of Decency had changed its name to the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP). The organization had dispensed with its more militant name, which seemed to connote a vigilante group, “to emphasize the more positive approach to films that the office was espousing.”75 NCOMP was more interested in endorsing good films than in spying out sensual footage in movies it disapproved of.76
What’s more, on September 20, 1966, Geoffrey Shurlock announced that the censorship code had been revised yet again, with a view to “the expansion of the artist’s freedom.” This was a move that Wilder certainly welcomed, just as he had the modifications in the legion’s policies. The latest revisions in the code set the stage for the unveiling on November 1, 1968, of the film industry’s own rating system. The new system would evaluate movies “on a sliding scale ranging from family-friendly to adults only.”77 The film censor’s office, like the legion, also acquired a new name; it became the Code and Rating Administration (CARA).
Jack Vizzard, Shurlock’s chief assistant, observed that non-Catholic and Catholic moviegoers alike preferred to follow the industry’s ratings rather than those of NCOMP. As a result, the studio bosses no longer allowed the Catholic organization to affect the moral content of movies.78
The inauguration of NCOMP and CARA made Wilder feel as if he had been let out of reform school as he began to work on his next picture, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. When it was finally released in November 1970, it would be Wilder’s first feature in four years, the longest hiatus in Wilder’s career. He had so many setbacks during the production of the film that it seemed that he had joined the ranks of such hard-luck filmmakers as Orson Welles.