He’s the subject of a retrospective that’s just opened at the National Film Theatre. Double Indemnity, The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, The Fortune Cookie… they’re all there. But Kiss Me, Stupid is the one I’m looking forward to most. Kiss Me, What? For reasons I’ve never understood, it’s always overlooked, yet as sex comedies go the Dean Martin romp is in a class of its own. I watched it again a few months ago, and couldn’t believe how raunchy the dialogue was (we’re talking 1964, remember). 
MARTIN: Why do they call you Lamb Chop?
KIM NOVAK: Maybe it’s because I wear paper panties.
The Hollywood critics (and the Catholic Church) hated it. Wilder’s biographer Ed Sikov is lukewarm too (“With a sick, sinking sensation, we are confronted by the everyday crumminess of being human…”) I think it’s almost as good as Some Like It Hot. Really.
UPDATE: More on the genius of Dino in the NYT's review of Jerry Lewis's book on the heyday of their double-act:
Martin and Lewis didn't become a true team until a few months later [in 1946], when they drove an Atlantic City audience wild with a makeshift routine scrawled in haste on a greasy brown paper pastrami sandwich bag. (Lewis has kept the bag to this day, in a safe-deposit box.) After that, no one could stop them.
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