Wilder was himself an established part of film history, on one of the great streaks the industry has ever seen. Every revered movie he would ever make — including but not at all limited to Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960) — had led up to this. Many of those films, of course, deal with sex and sexuality in the most overt way possible, taking it as their primary theme; could it be that Kiss Me, Stupid, the film that brought this run of greatness to a close, is in fact the wisest of them all on such matters?

It was supposed to be the beginning of something big for Wilder, the first entry in a fat four-picture deal that his success had earned him: $400,000 upfront for each picture, with 75 percent of the back end. But although the movie was dismissed in its day, and is only little better appreciated in ours, Kiss Me, Stupid is still a Bill Wilder picture, and that means something.

It was shot in beautiful Panavision, by Joseph LaShelle, and you really notice in the early scenes, when we make the acquaintance of the smalltown geography that superstar Dino has fallen into. The Panavision, in Sikov’s eloquent phrasing, conveys “the dull emptiness of his characters’ lives with even more expansive, vacuous space.”

Our two aspiring songwriters, Orville and Barney, are no more impressive than their surroundings, at best plain and unappealing. Many consider this casting a mistake, but of course it’s just what the movie needed — two unattractive schmucks whose desperation is all too believable, and whose contrast with the lustrous Dino is perfectly stark.

Originally, Orville was to be played by someone else — Peter Sellers, who in fact played a good deal of the scenes before experiencing a series of heart attacks that almost killed him and forced him to leave the picture. I don’t know that his absence from the film is really such a loss, but the absence of his footage certainly is. It would be fascinating to see if he could have played the role with as much sweet helplessness and naivete as Walston, or if the sharp force of his personality would have made him seem all too scheming and manipulative — and if his real-life tendency to jealousy would prove all too real for comedy.

It’s easy to dismiss Martin’s performance as that of an actor merely playing himself, but it must have taken a real kind of courage to so heartily embrace his public image as lecherous lusch, in an era before such self-deprecation from an actor was de rigueur. He drank constantly on set, without ever seeming drunk. “He had a glass in his hand all the time,” remembered Walston in Nick Tosches’s legendary biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. “And I got to the point where I thought, ‘This cocksucker’s full of shit. He doesn’t have anything in that glass except ginger ale.’ It was booze. But he was extremely professional. As a matter of fact, I learned some things from the guy. He had a very wonderful ease in front of the camera. A lot of actors get intimidated, especially in close-up work. Not him. He just took it very easy.”

Dino sizes up Polly the Pistol-for-Zelda.

He was the only person on set who could tell Wilder to fuck off — sometimes it seemed Wilder even liked it when he did — and he was given the kind of long-leashed latitude that comes with such respect. As if all this weren’t triumph enough, and as if this art-imitating-life bag weren’t enough of a gas, Dino would get a doozy of a dose of life-imitating-art. While crooners like himself were at the time on the wane, the Beatles were colonizing the culture. Someone in the movie teases Dino about this, and he responds with some feeble jokes at their expense. Much less feeble would be his song “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime,” just then recorded, which, when released during the film’s postproduction, would knock “A Hard Day’s Night” off Billboard’s top spot.