The Errand Boy

It's been a couple of months since the last time I popped in one of the DVDs from my Jerry Lewis box set, so recently I decided to watch The Errand Boy.

The movie starts promisingly enough, with a montage of how Hollywood makes movies, with pretty much nothing being real. We then move to Paramutual Studios (spelled this way as an obvious referent to Paramount which released the movie), ron by the Paramutual family which is headed by Tom (Brian Donlevy), with his wife Helen (Kathleen Freeman) also on the board). Apparently, the studio is doing well at the box office, but is not making as much money overall as it could because there's some sort of money wastage occurring on the lot that they can't figure out.

So, the board hires an analyst to watch the doings at the lot to determine where that money is being wasted, but the analyst says that he can't do the job, because everybody will recognize him. They need somebody secret that nobody will suspect of being a glorified spy. Thankfully for the board, trying to paste up a billboard just outside their office window is one Morty Tashman (Jerry Lewis). He is, as you can guess, thoroughly incompetent at the job.

The Paramutuals decide he'd be perfect for the spy job, and hire him on the spot, with him to report to Dexter Sneak (Howard McNear). Dexter, for his part, puts Morty into the studio messenger/errand service, where Morty's unsuspecting boss will be Grumpy (Stanley Adams).

At this point, the plot stops dead in its tracks, and we get an excuse for a bunch of sketch comedy from Jerry Lewis. We never really learn what's causing the leak in the studio's finances, and, to be fair, that's not really the point of the movie but more of a macguffin. But in any case, it's hard to give much of a lengthy synopsis to The Errand Boy.

Unfortunately, the sketches on the whole don't work as well as in the earlier The Bellboy, and with a relatively plotless movie unlike Cinderfella, the movie winds up being a lot less than perhaps it could have been. Some of the skits do work well, such as one the studio water tank, but others either don't work (the wacky-named characters whose names nobody can pronouce), and others are just oddly out of place (the juvenile basketball team).

The Errand Boy is a movie that's good to have as part of a box set, but I don't think it's ever going to be remembered as one of Jerry Lewis' finest hours.