Billy Wilder
Baciami Stupido

Billy Wilder was a great American director, the king of a certain type of American comedy, a comedy with great scripts, great actors, and sexy bombshells that turn heads, that was popular from the '50s to the '70s, and that today seems to have been lost. And it's a shame because this is the kind of comedy we'd love to see more often at the cinema. Wilder's comedy, based on misunderstandings or on the creation of situations so embarrassing that in the end, everything becomes permissible to escape them (killing, dressing as a woman or kicking the wife out of the house).

Take Orville (Ray Waltson), a devoted and passionate husband but also extremely jealous and paranoid, who sees in every man over the age of fifteen a potential lover of his wife, the beautiful Carmella. Our husband is also a composer waiting for the big break with his songs. When the legendary Dino, a famous singer (an extraordinary Dean Martin), arrives in town, he has the opportunity to play his pieces for him but, upon learning that Dino is a womanizer, kicks his wife out of the house to replace her with a prostitute: Polly the Bombshell (a fantastic, magnificent, sexual Kim Novak), a prostitute with a diamond in her navel, who lives with a parakeet in a trailer and keeps sneezing throughout the film.
From here on, embarrassing situations will arise, often bordering on the ridiculous with Orville literally throwing his wife into the arms of another man just to entertain him and make him comfortable, perhaps to make him a friend for a million-dollar contract, but not everything seems to go smoothly. The real wife returns home, discovers everything, and through an extremely strange twist of fate, she will become "Polly the Bombshell" at least for one night. The same fate will happen to the real Polly, who for one night will be the wife of the proud Orville.

At the end of the film, however, everyone has learned their lesson and everyone has gained something, so from betrayal stems a victory for all.
With this film, Billy Wilder returns to the subject of marriages (after "The Seven Year Itch") and once again points the finger at the husband-wife relationship and their betrayals (real or presumed). A film rich with references (it begins with a reference to "Irma la Douce"). It's also worth noting that at the time the film was a real flop because it was evidently too ahead of its time, but today such a work is the cornerstone of a certain type of comedy, a comedy that never tires and that we would all like to see again at the cinema.