DeanMartin Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Here in Austin, the Billy Wilder movie Kiss Me, Stupid is playing tonight as part of a series about Wilder's later films, and I suspect I am driving people crazy, trying to convince them to see it with me. I may have scared a local filmmaker at a screening of Wilder's One, Two, Three a couple of weeks ago, urging the poor man -- whom I hardly know -- to return for this film.

Kiss Me, Stupid is often considered one of Wilder's worst films, a smutfest from 1964 that helped end the Production Code in Hollywood, a black-and-white comedy that is the opposite of the sophisticated sex comedies of the early 1960s (Doris Day and that crowd). It might have been a very different movie with its original lead actor, Peter Sellers, but he was ill and had to be replaced by Ray Walston. And yet there's something about this sex comedy that's appealing to me. The cast includes not only Walston but Dean Martin, Kim Novak and Felicia Farr.

The opening credits, which you can watch via YouTube after the jump, are the only part of Kiss Me, Stupid set outside the small town of Climax, Nevada. In Las Vegas, a celebrity crooner known only in the film as Dino (Dean Martin, natch) is performing his closing-night act before driving to Hollywood. It's a glitzy Vegas nightclub, with stereotypical leggy showgirls. I sometimes wish this scene had been shot in color, like an anti-Wizard of Oz. But the comedy style sets you up perfectly for the tone of this film. It's also fun to know that not only is the song that Dino sings in the credits a Gershwin tune ("'S Wonderful") but so are all the "bad" songs throughout the movie.

Well, usually this works the other way around, but for once, a modern film is getting a classic update...at least when it comes to the trailer, anyway. This time, a dedicated fan by the name of whoiseyevan has made a trailer for the Ghostbusters movie that could have been...if it had been made in 1954. Taking over the roles made famous by Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray are crooner Dean Martin as Dr. Ray Stantz (Aykroyd), Fred McMurray as Dr. Egon Spengler (Ramis), and who else but Bob Hope could fill Murray's coveralls as the smart-a**, Dr. Venkman?

All those classic 'busting' touches are there, which is probably what made this fan-trailer such a success. Then again, I might be biased because they managed to work in one of my favourite lines from the film in one of the title cards. So even if you aren't impressed with the result, you have to hand it to whoiseyevan and his knowledge of spook and spectre movies from the 40s and 50s. Heck, he's even got a line of dialogue with Martin calling himself a Ghostbuster! Now that's what I call a happy coincidence.

After the jump: Ghostbusters 1954 Vs Ghostbusters 1984...

The pre-production plate of Steven Spielberg grows ever larger, and as we wait for him to tackle that long delayed Abraham Lincoln biopic, he's cracking a fifth Indiana Jones,
looking for 39 Clues, pondering a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, and annoying people with his Oldboy remake. Now he's lined up yet another possible directing gig as Variety reports that he might just go good and undercover with Matt Helm.

Now, you can't get any classier than Matt Helm. He's the leading man of Donald Hamilton's novels, and starred in 27 books of sheer badassery. A U.S. counter-agent, Helm didn't bother too much with the spying and espionage stuff, but just put himself into the right situations to kill people. He's grim and ruthless, with no time for love, and gives Bond and Bourne a run for their money. He's ripe for cinematic reinvention too, as Helm came to the big screen as a goofy, campy, wisecracking spy played by Dean Martin.

Times may have changed, but for years conversationalists who knew nothing about France except that french fries came from there always had a great fall back position: "You know, they worship Jerry Lewis movies." Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope analyzes the urban legend, while passing on some of his own notions regarding "highbrow critics (the only kind France has)".

When I was Paris once, I can remember reading the newspaper Le Figaro's review of "Allo Maman, C'est Moi Encore" (Hi Mom, It's Me Again better known as Look Who's Talking Too). The review began, as I recall, "What's more droll than a talking baby? Two of them!" Sheesh, that's more highbrow than Richard Roeper even! The Lewis libel is what is the novelist Gustave Flaubert called "a received idea," a bit of folk wisdom passed down uncritically from one ignoramus to another.

I have to admit that I came to birthday boy Jerry Lewis (he's 80 today) in a rather round-about way. When I was a kid, he was just that annoying, loud guy I flipped past on Saturday afternoon TV sometimes. As I an adult, however, I developed a possibly unhealthy obsession with Dean Martin, and it was through him that I recognized the young Lewis for the talent he was. As the French have always know, there was a tremendous amount of skill and calculation behind Lewis' childish persona, the true evidence of which lay in his ability to always stay just this side of the very, very, very fine line between gratingly endearing and too irritating to stand. Somehow, we never got quite so disgusted with him that we didn't, minutes later, find ourselves sympathizing with his struggles - really, there was a kind of genius to the way he kept us in the palm of his hand.

Though Lewis had a successful career after the breakup of his partnership with Martin, that remains his best known and most-loved period, even today. And, like many others, I prefer to remember him as he was then: young, manic, and brimming with ability.