Ray Walston

  • Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) One of the sure-fire ways to build an effective comedy is to get the characters to behave in ways that would be entirely contrary to expectations or common sense. So it is that by the time writer-director Billy Wilder gets cracking on the premise of Kiss Me, Stupid, he has a man doing everything he can to ensure that his wife has sex with a famous singer. Of course, she’s not really his wife and there’s a significant reward for him if he gets in the singer’s good graces, but that’s not the point — the point is seeing Ray Walston (as the man) setting up Dean Martin (obviously the singer) with Kim Novak (the “wife”) in flagrant contravention of all moral good sense. Getting there is half the fun, and getting out of it is the rest. Although the film lacks a clear climax and generally feels like lower-tier Wilder (it’s not one of his most popular features), there are plenty of good moments, starting with Martin spoofing himself by seamlessly going from his show to an exaggerated womanizing parody of his stage persona. (Some of the early plans for the film sound wilder — but Peter Sellers had a heart attack and Marilyn Monroe died, landing us with Walston and Kim Novak.) The result does feel more overtly ribald as other Wilder films of the time and not quite as witty, but as a 1960s sex comedy, Kiss Me, Stupid is not a bad pick at all.

  • South Pacific (1958)

    South Pacific (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2018) I like musicals a lot and fifties musicals are among the finest every made, but I do have a marked preference for musicals made for the screen rather than adapted from the stage, and I seem to have a specific lack of affinity for anything adapted from Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musicals. South Pacific is a case in point: A big bold musical set on the Pacific front during World War II, it features a young nurse taken with a creepy older Frenchman, with various hijinks from the US soldiers stationed nearby. It’s not that funny, which is a shame considering that the film’s most interesting moments are its funniest ones. Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi star, but Ray Walston is a highlight as a hapless soldier, while Juanita Hall is fantastic as a strong-willed islander woman. As is often the case, the film opens strong with good upbeat numbers (“Bloody Mary” and “There’s Nothing Like a Dame”), only to become duller and more romance-focused in its second half, with some comic interludes along the way. The cinematography of the film is a bit too out-there for the material—the use of strong colour filters is particularly annoying in washing out scenes that would have been perfectly good without them. There’s enough here to make South Pacific worth a watch for fans of musicals, but it hasn’t stood the test of time very well—especially considering that it was one of the top-grossing films of 1958.