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domino harvey wrote:Shearer seems dubious of Lewis' talents apart from the film, so it doesn't mean much

That may be true, but the whole interview is certainly entertaining

*thanks for the correction

As I said, great interview...if only Jerry had visited the show...

I feel like this board would know, but I can't think of a non documentary film that depicted actual concentration camps before 1972.

Pontecorvo's Kapo immediately comes to mind.

The Pawnbroker. Naked Among Wolves.

The Last Stage (Ostatni etap) (1948)

Forgot about this, but I remember cracking up at this anecdote published in the Chicago Sun-Times the morning after Lewis got the Jean Hersholt Award:

Given his poor health, Jerry Lewis “needs to be forgiven,” said a Hollywood matron, practically knocked on her kiester by the impatient comedy legend as he angrily stormed around the Governors Ball. “Come on!” he barked at several people he thought were blocking his way through the ballroom. “Get out of my way!”

“But then,” said the woman, staring at the drink Lewis’ jolt had caused her to spill down the front of her gown, “You’d think the guy who won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award would be a little more polite.”

TCM Remembers -- Jerry Lewis (1926-2017)

TCM has, rather appropriately, scheduled five of Jerry's films for Labor Day night and early the next morning.

8:00 PM ET
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1963)

10:00 PM ET
THE KING OF COMEDY (1983)

12:00 AM ET
THE STOOGE (1952)

2:00 AM ET
THE BELLBOY (1960)

3:30 AM ET
THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY (1964)

Boy, not the five I would have scheduled...

Was going to share my top 5 picks but I'll save it for a Jerry Lewis list project. [-o<

I guess it captures his career better than simply broadcasting the string of his triumphs as auteur with The Ladies Man thru to The Family Jewels. You've got his most famous film, his most celebrated dramatic performance, an mid-Martin & Lewis feature, his breakout as director, and a Tashlin. Disorderly Orderly is at the bottom of the pack in my estimation as far as the Tashlin features go (maybe It's Only Money is less interesting), but it's a fine film with some good gags. Obviously Artists & Models or Hollywood or Bust would have been preferred as the M&L feature. But overall I think it's a fair marathon.

I suppose it's a pretty fair representation when you break it down that way, but then again five feels pretty skimpy, especially when three will be played in the early morning hours. They could've added on two or three better films. The Ladies Man is a serious omission to me.

HJackson wrote:I guess it captures his career better than simply broadcasting the string of his triumphs as auteur with The Ladies Man thru to The Family Jewels. You've got his most famous film, his most celebrated dramatic performance, an mid-Martin & Lewis feature, his breakout as director, and a Tashlin. Disorderly Orderly is at the bottom of the pack in my estimation as far as the Tashlin features go (maybe It's Only Money is less interesting), but it's a fine film with some good gags. Obviously Artists & Models or Hollywood or Bust would have been preferred as the M&L feature. But overall I think it's a fair marathon.

Thank you for pointing this out. It's Only Money is the only one I've seen...and I haven't pursued another. Are the films Olive released not the place to start with Lewis? I figured a Tashlin may be a good bet.

I like Money but otherwise I'd only really recommend the '50s films.

Drucker wrote:Thank you for pointing this out. It's Only Money is the only one I've seen...and I haven't pursued another. Are the films Olive released not the place to start with Lewis? I figured a Tashlin may be a good bet.

Like swo I do enjoy It's Only Money, and I like the Tashlin films in general a great deal (especially Cinderfella and Geisha Boy - the latter of which is available on blu from Olive), but I think The Ladies Man or The Nutty Professor is a better place to go to see what Lewis could achieve. Lewis as a director was more ambitious than Tashlin ever seemed to be and I think if you give Ladies Man a shot you'll at least appreciate that Jerry had some measure of creative genius, even if you find the end result irritating. The closest Tashlin comes is Cinderfella, where he has some fun with the family estate and stages a pretty great ball (which famously caused Jerry's first heart attack), but even there Jerry was producing and I think he's generally credited with a high degree of authorship on that one.

He's not to everyone's taste as a screen comedian though, and you might get more out of the Martin & Lewis films (eg Artists & Models) which have a different dynamic.

I like it as well. The Geisha Boy might be a good point to start with the Olive releases, but the Dean Martin stuff might be the absolute best place to start.

A few may be hard to get a hold of now, but just to future-proof this discussion: the best Tashlins for me are Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Susan Slept Here, the Girl Can't Help It, and the Man From the Diner's Club. For Lewis-starring vehicles, Hollywood or Bust, Artists and Models, Cinderfella, and the Geisha Boy. While I wish it was still easy to obtain, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a showcase of pretty much everything Tashlin does best in one movie

domino harvey wrote:It's interesting that I'd blocked out Hulot having any romantic dalliances at all in these films! I've been thinking in the wake of Jerry Lewis' passing about how some physical comedians are able to pull off credible romantic endeavors in their films, and others aren't. For me, Lewis and Chaplin's personas and approach are too juvenile to ever feel comfortable with their romantic pursuits-- it's always like watching that scene from Blank Check where the kid kisses Karen Duffy! Of course, I don't mean "juvenile" as an insult to their talents or their films, and indeed the Gold Rush makes great use of this aspect of Chaplin's Little Tramp. But Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd's personas/filmic approaches are fully encompassing of making them credible romantic leads, and indeed much of their humor derives from their laborious attempts to woo or maintain plausible romantic relationships. As for Tati, well, he's so sexless to my mind that he's somewhere apart from either extreme, but I think it may be telling that I had erased these portions from my memory

Man, no joke. I've been going through the first Martin and Lewis set and it is really amazing how infantilized he is across these. Sailor Beware is probably the most extreme of these with Lewis as barely human and if he were one he's a 9 year old. Even the logic of his love interest is from a child. He essentially gets with her only because she doesn't smell bad. It's quite shocking at times particularly with the more dramatic The Stooge. It's also compelling how quickly they decided to play with their imagines with this idea of Lewis as a literal sexless child getting a lot of play in particular. It's almost as if no one knows what to do with him. Jumping Jacks is probably the most direct line of attack with a human Lewis character stuck in a largely real world (or at least not a living cartoon the way even in these early films he becomes).

domino harvey wrote: While I wish it was still easy to obtain, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is a showcase of pretty much everything Tashlin does best in one movie

You can still get this box set pretty cheaply- and while it loses a lot of visual quality compared to the MoC blu-ray, it gains in excellent commentaries on both that and The Girl Can't Help It.

Worked my way through the Mill Creek triple feature. 3 on a Couch is, as is to be expected, the best of the bunch. Jerry's work is more restrained than it was in his heyday at Paramount and it lacks the formal ambition of something like The Lardies Man, but it's entertaining nonetheless with Jerry doing multiple characters ala The Family Jewels (although here he is one character playing the role of many). I think the broadest stuff with the cowboy persona works the best, but it kicks into a higher gear at a crowded office party in the third act where Jerry's web comes unstuck. It must also be noted that the three women he has to schmooze are absolute knockouts. I would very much like to see The Big Mouth now... Hook, Line, and Sinker has a cracking first act comprised of vignettes of Jerry's tedious domestic life before being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Interestingly it's specified that he's an insurance salesman but his work life is barely touched upon. It lags badly in the middle act as Jerry lives it up on credit (although there is an amusing moment or two, especially a routine involving mouth-to-mouth) but takes an unexpected (to me at least) turn for the third act. As with the later Tashlin stuff Jerry has a production credit here so I'd be interested to know how much is "his". He's also relatively active here for late-60s Jerry.

Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River is incredibly misleading re: the name, poster with Jerry in a bowler hat and monocle with Tower Bridge etc. "Jerry Lewis in London" this really ain't, although there is a little local flavour (particularly welcome is a younger Patricia Routledge, who would go on to play iconic British sitcom character Hyacinth Bucket). Jerry opens a Chinese restaurant in his wife's English country house and gets caught up in some kind of corporate espionage/smuggling racket. He does his "Oriental" impression about half a dozen times. It's a weird one too because his performance is bipolar between his classic slapstick persona and the self-confident showbiz raconteur you'd later see chatting it up on The Dick Cavett Show - or you'd see earlier with more teeth as Buddy Love in Nutty Professor. It's quite jarring to see him go from demanding payment from Terry-Thomas to hamming up the mumps to sitting behind his desk with a cigarette smoothly laying out some absurd smuggling scheme.

Fiery Angel wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 4:42 pm "The Unknown Jerry" at MOMA

Damn, see the description for The Ladies Man:

In his second film as a director, Lewis is already demonstrating the sense of formal invention that would dazzle the French New Wave directors—a sense that is even more pronounced in this rare preview cut of the film, which includes an extended romantic subplot that builds to a breathtaking camera movement.

Uh, what the fuck is this

More info - can't believe I missed this the first time they showed it:

The Ladies Man will be screened in its rarely seen preview cut, which was discovered by Robert Furmanek, Lewis’s personal archivist at the time, in a dumpster on the Paramount lot. It features several scenes—including a virtuoso dream sequence—which were cut from the released version. The print played previously at the 2016 MoMA retrospective of Lewis’s career, also organized by Dave Kehr.

domino harvey wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:36 pm Uh, what the fuck is this

There are some clips from that here.

He didn't direct it but I recently watched Visit to a Small Planet (Norman Taurog 1960) and for a film without much of a reputation, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. How much you will get out of this bastardized Gore Vidal (!) adaptation is probably proportional to how badly you want to see Hitchcock mainstay John Williams dressed as an alien leather daddy or Fred Clark in a toupee repeatedly smooshing his face against an unseen pane of glass. I think this may actually be Lewis' best non-Tashlin or self-directed film, at least of those I've seen, because it is so generous in giving good bits to the supporting cast and Clark and Williams are so far from actors I'd ever pair with Lewis and yet so straight-faced and game for anything that it's really a lot of fun to see them just run with this out of their comfort zone. Other than Lewis out-weirding the weirdos at the local beatnik cafe (With one hep daddy-o memorably screaming out, "That's it, I'm shaving my beard" as he runs away), he's pretty demure in this one, so it's not a great Lewis film for anything he brings so much as it is for how he plays off some unexpected character actors