Artists and Models (1955)

Jerry Lewis was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars in 2024. I recorded several of the movies, but since YouTube TV's cloud DVR only keeps stuff for nine months, there was a fair bit that I didn't get to before it expired. In the intervening period, TCM ran one of Lewis' films with Dean Martin that wasn't part of the Summer Under the Stars programming and that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded that as well, and recently finally got around to watching that movie: Artists and Models.

Dean Martin is one of the artists. He plays Rick Todd, who is a comic book artist, except that he's not having much success getting jobs. He shares an apartment with best friend Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis). Eugene would like to write children's books, and has a couple of characters, a goose and a field mouse. But he has a thing for comic books, specifically reading The Bat Lady, which I'm surprised passed trademark muster since it's clearly a riff on Batman. The comic books give him nightmares however, and his loud screaming during the nightmares causes everybody in the apartment building except Eugene to have a problem with it.

One night something happens that causes Eugene to go upstairs to the apartment immediately above his, and when he knocks on the door he finds two women. One is another artist, Abby Parker (Dorothy Malone), while the other is a model, Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The important thing, however, is that Bessie is modeling for Abby, dressed as... The Bat Lady! Meanwhile, Bessie is into astrology, and has some idea in her head that her horoscope is going to have her falling in love with someone whose description Eugene just happens to fit to a T, even though he has no clue that Bessie out of the Bat Lady getup is the same person he met that night. Abby and Bessie both work for the Murdock publishing company, which isn't too happy with Abby's stories since they're not shocking enough. She quits, and Rick tries to get an in with Murdock since the company needs a new comic book artist.

Meanwhile, Rick tries to get ideas for his comics by listening to Eugene's nightmares, taking down what he says, and then incorporating those ideas into his new comic book series, Vincent the Vulture. Along the way, he and Abby start a relationship of their own although it gets complicated by other women always being around. The comic book sells well, although there's an issue with the violence in it, since there's a growing chorus of parents not wanting their children to be influenced by comic violence. (In real life the Comics Code had been instituted a year before the release of Artists and Models, rendering this a timely issue.)

The bigger problem is that Eugene dreams up a sequence of letters and numbers that just happens to coincide with half of a formula that the US military is using in its attempts to get into outer space and set up space stations (this was two years before Sputnik). How does a comic book artist know this formula, and is the artist releasing it to the Soviets? The bad guys somehow know this is a formula, and send sexy spy Sonia (Eva Gabor) to try to get the other half of the formula, leading to a madcap finale.

There's a fair bit in Artists and Models to like, although it's certainly not a perfect movie. The idea is certainly a good one, but having to fit it into the Martin and Lewis formula certainly presents problems. There are any number of spots where it feels like the movie is stopping for some of Jerry's physical humor that doesn't really advance the plot (the chiropractor scene being an obvious example). There are also musical numbers for Dean's singing, some of which work well although again they don't quite advance the plot. Director Frank Tashlin, who got his start in cartoons, uses visuals effectively. Shirley MacLaine was only in her second movie, and is quite appealing here.

So despite its flaws, Artists and Models is definitely worth watching.

Rock-a-Bye Baby

I mentioned a couple of times how Jerry Lewis got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and how I recorded a ton of movies, because even though I have a box set of some of Lewis' films, a lot of what TCM selected was not on that box set. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to watching all of them before they expired, but one that I did watch is Rock-a-Bye Baby.

Marilyn Maxwell plays Carla Naples, one of those small-town girls like Esther Blodgett who couldn't stand the small town and went to Hollywood to try to make it big. She's done so, but with a squeaky-clean image. Unbeknownst to the studio, she went and blew up that image by getting married to a bullfighter in Mexico and getting pregnant on her wedding night before the bullfighter was killed in the ring the next day. So there's a kid on the way and no husband or marriage license, Carla having ripped that up.

Carla's agent Harold Hermann (Reginald Garidner) suggests that she go off somewhere to have the kid like Bette Davis in The Great Lie and then have someone she can trust take care of the kid until they can figure out what to do that will be all nice and legal and not ruin Carla's image. Unfortunately, Carla's Italian immigrant father has never forgiven her for wanting to do the Hollywood thing, so he's right out.

But Carla does have a one-time boyfriend in her midwestern hometown from back when both were very young, that being Clayton Poole (Jerry Lewis), who is now working as a TV repairman, although this being Jerry Lewis, the word "repair" is doing a lot of work. Clayton loved Carla even more than she liked him, and he's always wanted to be a father although he's never found the right woman. In fact, the right woman is right under his nose in the form of Carla's kid sister Sandra (Connie Stevens). Carla discovers that she's actually pregnant with triplets, and drops the kids off on Clayton's front step.

Clayton tries to raise the kids as a single father with some help from Sandra. A lot of complications ensue because Clayton isn't quite up to raising triplet infants. Not because he's a bad person or negligent, but he does have to work and somebody has to look after the kids. That's going to lead to a climactic courtroom scene since there are understandably people who think there's something better for the kids than this low-earning single father who is not the biological father. Being a Jerry Lewis comedy, however, there's going to be a requisite happy ending.

Rock-a-Bye Baby is a loose remake of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, reworked for the abilities of Jerry Lewis. Lewis wasn't directing himself yet, here being directed again by Frank Tashlin who was adept at directing boundary-pushing, mildly subversive comedies (his previous film was Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), and had directed Lewis a couple of times before. So he's able to tone down Lewis, although some of the physical comedy, as in the initial TV repair scene involving Lewis adjusting a rooftop antenna, does veer into over-the-top territory.

Rock-a-Bye Baby is competently made if not great, more the sort of thing that would serve as comfort food to fans of Lewis.

No Girl Scouts Here

Jerry Lewis was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the opportunity to record several movies I haven't seen before; to be honest, I don't know that I'm going to get around to all of them before they expire from my DVR. Next up is a movie in which Jerry only has a supporting role: Cookie.

Cookie is a teenaged girl played by Emily Lloyd, but we don't see her at first. Instead, we get an introductory scene of one of those limousines that clearly looks like it's taken from a 1970s or 1980s mobster movie, which is appropriate since this is indeed a Mob-themed movie. The limo stops in an isolated part of New York one night, presumably for a meeting between the passenger there and somebody else, or perhaps to dump a dead body in the bay. But that's pre-empted by an explosion, killing the passenger in the limo. Fast forward a few days to the funeral of mobster Dino Capisco. And then....

The next scene informs us that it's a few months earlier. Cookie, together with her friend Pia (Ricki Lake in a small role) are out in Manhattan cruising the gray-market stalls with a modicum of money; running out of cash, they jump the turnstiles in the subway which gets them caught and sent to court. Poor Cookie seems to be about to go to jail since she can't pay bail, but at the last moment a strange man comes in and gets her released without bail pending a later appearance. That man then trundles Cookie into a limo and takes Cookie... to Sing Sing.

There, Cookie meets Dino Capisco (Peter Falk), who is her biological father. Except that he never married Cookie's mom Lenore (Dianne Wiest) because Dino has been married to Bunny (Brenda Vaccaro) who runs a doggy day care and won't grant Dino a divorce even though he's been in prison for the past 13 years. Dino is up for parole now, and doesn't want Cookie's legal problems to derail that parole even though apparently nobody really knows about Dino's illegitimate daughter. But with him about to get out of jail, he wants to do the right thing by her, or at least not have her screw up his post-prison life. He uses his influence with the other mobsters to get Cookie a job in New York's garment district at a sweatshop run by Dino's old partner Carmine, who is definitely the one preferred by the big boss Enzo (Lionel Stander). Likely they conspired to get Dino sent up to Sing Sing.

Before going to prison, Dino was involved in a construction deal in Atlantic City with the decidedly non-Italian mob-affiliated Arnold Ross (Jerry Lewis with the big 80s glasses, if you couldn't tell). Ross was supposed to hold a bunch of money in escrow, and Dino was hoping to use that to start a new life. But that money has ended up with Carmine and Enzo, and Dino wants it back.

Now, everything Dino is doing is decidedly a violation of his parole, and likely outright illegal. But then, this is the only life he knows. And in trying to get closer to his daughter Cookie, he's also getting her into the mob life, although she both doesn't quite want that and is also utterly naïve as to what being related to the Mob entails. She turns out to have a method to her madness, although there's that opening scene and the funeral of Dino on the horizon....

Cookie is a little movie, and although it's never going to be considered a masterpiece, it turns out to be a lot of fun. It was directed by Susan Seidelman, who did Desperately Seeking Susan a few years earlier, and it's easy to see the same influence in both movies. The movie has a bunch of twists and turns leading to a satifying conclusion, although I don't know if that conclusion is quite realistic.

Cookie slipped through the cracks for some reason, and that's a bit of a shame because of how entertaining it is.

At War With the Army

I've mentioned several times how Jerry Lewis was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the chance to record quite a few of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them were several of Lewis' movies with his comedy partner Dean Martin. An early effort from the two of them was At War With the Army.

At War With the Army was released in 1950, but set during World War II. PFC Alvin Korwin (Jerry Lewis) has presumably been drafted into the Army, as he doesn't seem competent enough to serve and, if anything, would like to get a pass to see his wife and newborn kid, which makes you wonder why he's in the army. He's also incompetent enough that he gets put on things like KP, with the rest of his incompetency further making one wonder why he's still in the military. But I guess with a war on they need men.

PFC Korwin's old friend Vic Puccinelli (Dean Martin) is also in the Army, and serving at the same base where Korwin is stationed. Vic is obviously more competent, as he's been promoted to sergeant. However, he actually wants to do real service, and is chafing at having been put on desk duty. He'd like to be shipped off overseas, although his superiors want to keep him stateside since he's good at what he does. They're planning on promoting him to warrant officer.

The base is putting on a show, which is really more of an excuse for the movie to include several songs for Dean Martin to sing. Lewis sings, too, although as we all know he's not a traditional singer. Meanwhile, the other main plot line of the movie, such as it is, involves a woman named Millie who used to date Vic. She says she wants to see Vic again, and that if she can't, there might be trouble. Wires get crossed in the style of later TV sitcoms, and since people are talking about one of the soldiers' women being pregnant, everybody gets the impression that Vic might have knocked Millie up out of wedlock.

For me, the big problem with At War With the Army is that it feels like it doesn't really have a coherent plot. Martin and Lewis had suddenly become successful, and wanted to spread their wings, so this movie was made away from their home studio of Paramount. Without the big studio backing them, it feels like they didn't have enough to come up with a fully fledged plot and instead came up with something that barely covers what is a bunch of sketches. One odd sketch involves Lewis in a dress that he's wearing to get off base for the evening. He winds up at a bar where all the other soldiers save one drunk sergeant are turned off by him. But overall, the movie doesn't really work.

Which Way to the Front

Last August, Jerry Lewis was selected as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Lewis' movie career really petered out after 1970, and watching the movie that caused this -- Which Way to the Front? -- it's easy to see why.

The movie is set in 1943, which is of course the height of World War II. Lewis plays Brendan Byers III, the owner of several businesses producing weaponry and other stuff for the US war effort. Now, because of this, and the fact that Lewis was already past 40 by the time he made this movie, you'd think that the US government wouldn't want him fighting. Byers is the classic "dollar-a-year" man. And yet, Byers gets a draft notice; not only that, but he seems happy to be called to fight, which makes you wonder why he didn't volunteer in the first place. But he's rejected by the Army. Not because of his usefulness back on the home front, but because he's 4-F for what are presumably mental reasons; we see him suck on a baby's pacifier as well as do the Jerry Lewis gibberish routine after he's rejected.

Brendan commiserates with three other rejects, all of whom wanted to fight in the war because they have other things to get away from. Sid Hackle (Jan Murray) is a nightclub comedian who's ticked off the wrong Mob-affiliated people, and has them coming after him. Peter Bland (Steve Franken) has a domineering wife and mother both of whom treat him like crap. And Terry Love (Dack Rambo) has a wife who's about to give birth, only for his old girlfriend to show up.

Brendan, being rich, comes up with an idea: train all of them, and perhaps be able to be of some us to the military as a volunteer force. After all, Brendan has the money to do it and not be a financial burden on the war effort. So he hires people who can do military training and trains this motley crew, before putting them all on his yacht and heading off to Italy. Surprisingly, they survive the trip to Italy without getting discovered by the Allied forces or torpedoed by U-boats. When they get to Italy, where the front lines have been in a stalemante for some months, Brendand bluffs his way into getting orders to deal with the situation.

Brendan's plan is to imitate Erik Kesselring (also played by Lewis, of course), who is one of the bigwigs in the Nazi occupation force in Italy. Since the Allies win the war, and this movie is supposed to be a comedy, we can deduce that Brendan's plan is going to succeed.

Unfortunately, Jerry Lewis directed himself once again, and as always, he never seemed to know how to rein himself in. It also doesn't help that Lewis was stuck in the rut of having done the same sort of comedy for closing in on 15 years now, if not 20, and it was really beginning to look old-fashioned. Further, the production values here are terrible, looking like a bad Jack Webb-produced TV show. The result is that Which Way to the Front? is a movie with a terrible reputation, and frankly quite deserving of that reputation. Maybe you should try giving it one watch to see where things went so badly wrong for Lewis, but that's probably all you'll want.

Scared Stiff

Jerry Lewis was part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past August, and that gave me the chance to record a bunch of his movies that I hadn't seen before, since the ones they selected were mostly not the ones on my Jerry Lewis box set. So I'll be going through them over the next year or so. Next up is Scared Stiff.

Scared Stiff is one of the movies Lewis made when he was still part of a comedy team with Dean Martin, and we see Dean Martin first, as nightclub singer Larry Todd. Except that we don't see Martin right away either. Instead, there's an introductory scene of a waiter at the club being approached by a gangster's henchman because the waiter has been seeing the gangster Shorty's girlfriend Rosie (Dorothy Malone). When Larry enters the club, however, we learn that he too has been seeing Rosie. As for Jerry Lewis, he plays Myron Mertz, a busboy at the club which is a good way for Lewis to do physical comedy with food before a routine with Myron, Larry, and Rosie.

After the routine, Myron meets Larry in Larry's dressing room, and informs him of the waiter who was taken away by the gangster for being with a chorus girl, at which point Larry finds out that Rosie is a gangster's moll. Larry leaves he club in a panic, and Shorty calls Larry's dressing room only to get Myron. Myron decides he'll do a favor for Larry by going to the hotel where Larry has been summoned and confronting Shorty in Larry's stead.

Also at the hotel, and on the same floor as the gangsters, is Mary Carroll (Lizabeth Scott). She's spending her last night at the hotel before taking a cruise down to Cuba. She has an inheritance there, and it's an entire island with a castle. However, there's no electricity on the island, and there are rumors that the castle is haunted or something, since nobody's spent a full night in the castle in 20 years. Mary also draws the ire of Shorty by making a joke about murder during a power outage.

A gunfight ensues between one of Shorty's henchmen and a man trying to buy the castle from Mary. Larry is in the hallway trying to save Myron and has a gun of his own, and since he drew it he fears he might be arrested for murder. He escapes into one of the hotel rooms, which happens to be Mary's. He hides, but it's in Mary's trunk, which by the time the police are finished with their investigation has already been sent to the pier. So Myron and Mary go to the pier, and as you can guess, a comedy of errors occurs that results in Myron and Larry winding up on the cruise after it's set sail. Thanks to their comedy stylings, they're able to work their way to Havana, meeting singer Carmelita (Carmen Miranda in her final film role).

Larry and Mary fall in love along the way, and when they and Myron get to the island, they find out that someone has a reason for wanting to buy the castle from Mary, although they haven't quite yet figured out what that reason is. But since this is a comedy, you can guess that everything is going to be wrapped up with a happy ending.

Scared Stiff was based on an old Bob Hope comedy called The Ghost Breakers, which I have on my Bob Hope box set but have not yet seen. As such, I can't compare the two movies to see whether the remake is that much worse; any number of reviewers suggest that The Ghost Breakers is a better movie. As for standing on it's own, I'd say that Scared Stiff isn't that bad a movie, but some of the other Martin/Lewis pairings I've seen are better. Perhaps The Ghost Breakers just wasn't the best material to adapt to the strengths of Martin and Lewis.

The Geisha Boy

Jerry Lewis was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars back in August, and TCM ran quite a few of his films that I had not seen before and weren't on my Jerry Lewis box set that I've gone through over the past several years. I think I finished up that set when I posted on The Nutty Professor since that one was on the TCM schedule. The upshot is that I've got a fair amount of Lewis' work to get through over the next several months before the stuff expires from the YouTube TV DVR. But even before that, I noticed that I had a different Lewis movie that aired on TCM previously and was not reused for the Summer Under the Stars block: The Geisha Boy, which showed up when Sessue Hayakawa was Star of the Month in May.

Jerry Lewis stars as Gilbert Wooley, a failed musician who hasn't worked in months but has a rabbit, Harry, who's the star of the show. Gilbert and Harry show up at the airport in Los Angeles because they've been booked as part of a USO tour of Japan that's being headlined by actress Lola Livingston (Marie McDonald). Wooley and Lola immediately do the exact opposite of hitting it off, as Harry agitates Lola's dog to the point that the military orders the dog to stay behind as part of its no pets policy. Then, on the flight, Wooley keeps causing trouble as part of his attempts to keep everybody from finding out about the existence of Harry. The only person who seems to have any sympathy for Wooley is stewardess Sgt. Pearson (Suzanne Pleshette in one of her earliest roles).

When the plane lands in Tokyo, Wolley screws up Lola's PR reveal so badly that Lola uses her influence as headliner to get Wooley kicked off the tour. But Wooley also developed an ally as a result of his physical comedy failures. Maj. Ridgely (Barton MacLane), the organizer of the tour, doesn't speak Japnese, and needs an interpreter, which he's given in the form of Kimi Sikita. She's also the guardian of her nephew, Mitsuo, as his parents died tragically some time back and Mitsuo hasn't gotten over it. Until now, as Wooley's antics cause Mitsuo to smile and laugh for the first time in ages.

So Wooley now has a little boy who looks up to him, and a woman who in a normal movie would become a love interest. But this is a Jerry Lewis film, so you know it's going to be more about the sight gags than about a wholly coherent plot. And in any case, Kimi also has a boyfriend, or at least someone she's "supposed" to marry, that being the star pitcher on one of the the local baseball teams. This subplot is never fully realized but is used to set up a scene of an exhibition game between the Japanese team and the Dodgers who had literally just moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Eventually the time comes for Wooley to return to America, but little Mitsuo doesn't want Wooley to leave. Mitsuo is willing to create an international incident to deal with his plight, although that incident leads to the requisite happy ending for all the right characters.

As I've strongly implied above, The Geisha Boy is another of Jerry Lewis' movies that's much stronger in the sight gag and physical comedy departments than it is in the area of a good story. Indeed, the whole idea of the "clash of cultures" is one where it's easy to see people getting humor from, while at the same time running a serious risk of greatly offending people if it isn't handled well. Thankfully, most of the movie is on the side that doesn't play to the stereotypes, although I found the baseball game scene poorly handled. As for Hayakawa, he plays Kimi's father, and gets a sight gag of his own when he's directing a bunch of men in his backyard garden pond to build a bridge that looks suspiciously like the one on the river Kwai.

The Geisha Boy didn't get the best reception, and watching it, it's easy to see why this of Lewis' films is so little remembered. There are some fun sight gags here, but that's not enough to sustain an entire movie.

The Nutty Professor

The next star of the day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Jerry Lewis, whose movies show up tomorrow, August 17. I've got a box set of 10 of his movies, and have blogged about most of them before. Some of the movies in that set are on TCM tomorrow, and the one I haven't blogged about before is The Nutty Professor, which airs at 8:00 PM on August 17.

Lewis plays Julius Kelp, a professor of chemistry at a local university; as the opening credits roll Kelp is doing the sort of experiments stereotypical to the movies: photogenic colored liquids in various forms of glassware, and mixing liquids together to produce stuff that bubbles over. The last experiment, however, sets off an explosion that rocks the whole campus, especially the administration building where the trustees are meeting. So college president Dr. Warfield (Del Moore) is none too pleased.

The next day in class, one of Dr. Kelp's students is revealed to be a player on the football team, not taking a course like Rocks for Jocks or Clouds. (To be fair, my freshman fall I was in Multivariable Calculus with a future NFL starting quarterback.) Dr. Kelp is disappointed that one of his students puts athletics over academics, and the football player responds by stuffing Dr. Kelp into a closet. Helping out of the closet is another student, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens).

Dr. Kelp has up to now been the apotheosis of the 98-pound weakling pictured in the old Charles Atlas-type ads: small, a voice not suitable for radio, wearing thick glasses, and the like. So Kelp decides that he's going to try to change himself by going to a gym, which is really just an excuse for an extended scene of Jerry Lewis-style visual and physical humor, not that that's a bad thing. But of course the upshot is that working out does not, in fact, work out for Prof. Kelp.

So instead, he decides to subscribe to the idea of better living through chemistry, which makes sense considering that he's a chemist. As with Village of the Giants several weeks back, Julius starts mixing all sorts of chemicals, and then experimenting on himself. But instead of the result turning him into a giant, it turns him into a lounge lizard, which is in many ways a good thing for him in that the students like to hang out at just such a lounge, and Stella has suggested Dr. Kelp show up there.

So Kelp, having taken the potion, turns into a suave alter ego he calls Buddy Love, and shows up as Love at the student lounge. Stella is taken by Buddy Love, and eventually all the students are intrigued by him. Of course, the potion is bound to wear off, and when it does, it has all sorts of problems and consequences. More surprising is the fact that nobody seems to put two and two together for the longest time.

The Nutty Professor is, like many of Jerry Lewis' movies, one that doesn't exactly have the greatest of scripts, in that the plot is once again more a vehicle for Jerry Lewis' brand of humor than it is something that drives a story. Now, in a movie like The Bellboy, the sketches really work. The Nutty Professor isn't quite as good, but much of the material does come off fairly well. The Kelp character and the absurd transformation are also obvious places to mine humor, something that Lewis does quite well here.

If you haven't seen The Nuty Professor before, definitely see it since it's airing now.

The Patsy

Stella Stevens died yesterday, and the obituaries mention that she was the bombshell in the Jerry Lewis movie The Nutty Professor. That movie happens to be on the box set of Jerry Lewis movies that I have, but unfortunately, I just very recently watched a different movie off that set to do a post on here: The Patsy.

Jerry Lewis is again the star, and since this is one of his later movies, the director as well. But we don't see Lewis at first, at least not after the opening credits. Instead, we hear about some popular comic actor who dies in a plane crash in Alaska. We then meet the people around that deceased actor: his manager, press agent, and the like, played by a cast of mostly character actors. These include John Carradine, Ina Balin, Keenan Wynn, Everett Sloane, Phil Harris, and Peter Lorre who looks like death warmed over largely because he died shortly after shooting and before the movie was released. Now that their nominal boss is dead, they're technically out of a job.

The handlers are meeting in the dead actor's penthouse suite at the Beverly Hilton, and who should come in but bellboy Stanley (that's Jerry Lewis, as if you couldn't tell), very incompetently trying to serve them their drinks. Instead of getting him fired on the spot, the handlers come up with the insane idea that perhaps they could turn Stanley into a star. At least they'd have somebody pliable whom they could keep mooching off of. And since all these people were repping a big star in the past, they've got an in to the movers and shakers in Hollywood to try to make Stanley a star in his own right.

There's just one catch, however. They need somebody with talent, and, well, that's one thing Stanley doesn't seem to have. They try to dress him up in fine clothes (watch for a cameo from George Raft), get him elocution lessons (with Hans Conried, whose character also collects antiques), have him cut a record, and do a press availability with the columnists of the day that turns into a sketch involving Hedda Hopper and her hat. But can they make Stanley a star?

As with a lot of Jerry Lewis' movies after the split between him and Dean Martin, The Patsy is shorter on plot and longer on a series of sketches that serve a threadbare framing story. But it's also an excuse to get all sorts of Hollywood stars in one-scene cameos. I mentioned George Raft and Hedda Hopper, but there's also Ed Sullivan, Scatman Crothers, Richard Deacon, and a whole bunch more, some credited and some not.

But do the sketches work? Some do and some don't; the original The Bellboy is probably the best of the Lewis sketch comedy movies in that the greatest proportion of the sketches work. Here, the Hopper scene is great in part because her hat is so ridiculous and everybody is supposed to act like they're in The Emperor's New Clothes and not notice is. Stanley is the only one to notice is, and acts like we're all thinking. The song Stanley records is terrible even without his singing (or in drag as a trio of back singers), and wouldn't be rescued by a competent recording artist -- but it's supposed to be bad. Some of the other scenes are just too manic. I didn't care so much for the scene with Conried, or the one where Stanley goes on an American Bandstand-like show. (Presumably they couldn't get Dick Clark for a cameo.)

Overall, The Patsy is the sort of movie Jerry Lewis fans will like. But if I were introducing people to Jerry Lewis, I'd still start with either The Bellboy or his movies with Dean Martin.

The Family Jewels

Another of the box sets I've got is a ten-film collection of Jerry Lewis comedies, mostly from after he and Dean Martin split up. I'm down to one or two that I hadn't blogged about before, so recently I cracked that set open again in order to watch The Family Jewels.

Jerry Lewis is Willard Woodward, chauffeur and nominal bodyguard to Donna Peyton (Donna Butterworth, a child actress whose acting career never went anywhere). In the film's opening scene, Willard inadvertently foils a robbery. Meanwhile, we learn that Donna has recently become an orphan with the passing of her father, and it's time for the reading of the will. Donna's father had a whole bunch of brothers, it seems, as the will specifies that Donna should go live with five of them for a while, one after the other. After she does that, she gets to decide which of the five will become her new foster father. The five are, in order of their appearance:

James Peyton, the captain of a ferry boat out in the harbor, who has a ridiculous walrus moustache;
Everett Peyton, a clown who has judicously saved up his money in a Swiss bank account and who deep down inside hates children. He plans to retire to Switzerland so he doesn't have to deal with children any more.
Julius Peyton, a commercial photographer who is just a bit too meticulous in his work, making the photo shoots a slog for all of his photographic subjects
"Captain" Eddie Peyton, who has spent his time restoring a commuter-sized airplane at the local airport. During his segment, a group of little old ladies miss their flight to Chicago on the big jet plane, and wind up paying Eddie for passage, which is a problem as Eddie doesn't have many flight hours and the plane may not be totally airworthy; and
Skylock Peyton, a private detective who has an assistant Dr. Matson (Sebastian Cabot).

Now, it doesn't take very long to notice that all five of these uncles are played by Jerry Lewis as well. And, there's also a sixth uncle, "Bugsy" Peyton, also played by Lewis and sporting a painted-on five-o'clock shadow. Bugsy is already a gangster, which is probably why he was written out of the will. He's miffed at that, so he consistently tries to kidnap little Donna and bump off Willard.

It's also fairly easy to see which uncle Donna is going to choose. Or, more accurately, the fact that it's not any of the uncles who is the right man to be the foster father, as nice as four of them (minus Bugsy and Everett) are. It's Willard who is clearly the person who should be the foster father, although that's not allowed in the will. So how is the movie going to get to that conclusion?

The Family Jewels is another of those movies that gives Jerry Lewis the chance to put his own brand of physical and visual comedy on the screen, as he also directed it. And therein lies the problem with the movie. There doesn't seem to have been anybody around to edit out the excessess, or at least edit it in the right way. As a result, the movie is very much hit-and-miss, and unfortunately misses more than many of Lewis' earlier pictures did. Some scenes are good; there's one dealing with the in-flight movie on Eddie's plane (featuring a cameo from Anne Baxter). The plane hits turbulence, and suddenly the dinner scene in the Baxter movie hits the same turbulence. There's also a well-directed and well-choreographed sequence with a ROTC drill team.

On the other hand, some portions, like the Julius segment, go on much too long, and a lot of the gags are telegraphed. So the final result is a movie that might appeal to the people who already like Jerry Lewis, as well as a movie that's nice to have in a box set. But it's not the best of Lewis' work by any means.

The Disorderly Orderly

It's been a couple of months since I opened up my Jerry Lewis box set, so recently, I took out one of the DVDs and watched The Disorderly Orderly.

Jerry Lewis plays Jerome Littlefield, a man who wanted to be a doctor but flunked out of medical school and wound up as an orderly at a private sanitarium instead. Now, there's a reason why he flunked out of medical school, and that does drive the portion of the movie that has a paper-thin plot, but most of the movie is episodic, as with a lot of Lewis' movies from The Bellboy on. Littlefield is, unsurprisingly, not particularly competent at his job, right from the first scene at the sanitarium where he's supposed to strait-jacket a TV celebrity who is a high-paying patient, but who winds up putting the straitjacket on Littlefield instead!

All of this is much to the consternation of Littlefield's nominal supervisor, head of nurses Maggie Higgins (Kathleen Freeman). The thing that drives her absolutely nuts about him is that he doesn't just try without succeeding, he tries too hard because he simply cares too much. Someone who would agree with this statement is the chief of staff at the sanitarium, Dr. Jean Howard (Glenda Farrell). Dr. Howard was in fact in love with Littlefield's father, and sees that Littlefield's problem is that he's got some sort of neurotic empathy. Probably the best example of this is when Jerome is supposed to be pushing the wheelchair in which hypochondriac patient Mrs. Fuzzibee (Alice Pearce) is sitting. She talks cheerfully with all the other patients about the plethora of diseases she's had. But it's Jerome who winds up displaying all the symptoms, a scene which shows Lewis' prowess for physical comedy.

The neurotic empathy plot also involves another nurse, Julie Blair (Karen Sharpe), who is in love with Jerome. Jerome, for his part, keeps screwing up the relationship, but not out of any sort of malice. Things get more complicated when an emergency patient is brought to the sanitarium after a suicide attempt. Nobody knows who she really is, except for Jerome. It's Susan Andrews (Susan Oliver), a woman who went to high school with Jerome. Jerome was in love with her, but she was in love with someone else, and this destroyed Jerome. Now that she's back, he's going to try to make it right. However, this is a private hospital, and if she can't pay for the bed, she's going to be have to be transfered to the public hospital.

It all results in a manic car chase between Jerome in one ambulance, Dr. Howard and Nurse Higgins in another, and the chairman of the sanitarium, Mr. Tuffington (Everett Sloane) on a gurney in the back of Jerome's ambulance. Tuffington has wanted to fire Jerome, and also wants to fire Dr. Howard for not bringing in enough revenue.

As always with Jerry Lewis' solo work, how much you like The Disorderly Orderly is going to depend on how much you like Lewis' brand of comedy. For me, that's a bit of a mixed bag, depending somewhat on how much the movie has a coherent plot. Cinderfella, for example, does have a better plot, while The Bellboy is one of the few movies where the sketches almost entirely work. In The Disorderly Orderly, some of the scenes work better than others, but it's definitely more hit than The Errand Boy or The Ladies' Man. The scene with Mrs. Fizzibee is one of the highlights, as is one where Lewis is asked to play TV repairman because a patient has a snowy picture (remember that from analog TV days?). Lewis opens up the TV -- and a blizzard of real snow comes pouring out, complete with wind that messes up everything in the patient's room!

The Disorderly Orderly is one of those movies that's nice to have on a box set, although I wouldn't pay standalone DVD prices for it. Jerry Lewis fans will probably like it, while others should start with a Lewis movie like The Bellboy.

The Ladies Man

Going through some of my DVD box sets, I decided to crack open the Jerry Lewis set again since I had six or seven movies I hadn't blogged about before. This time, I selected The Ladies Man.

Lewis plays Herbert Heebert, who at the start of the movie is graduating from college. He's got a girlfriend he's about to propose to. Except that when he goes up to pop the question, he finds that she's with another man. This of course leaves Herbert depresed and not sure what to do with his life, so he thinks about leaving town.

There's a big mansion that has a help wanted sign up, stating that the job has to go to a bachelor. Herbert having been jilted and thus taking a break from women for a while, and in need of a job, inquires about it with Katie (Kathleen Freeman), the maid of the house. She, and the house's owner, former opera singer Miss Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel) are thrilled, giving Herbert a room to spend the night before he starts work in the morning.

It's only in the morning that Herbert discovers the house has dozens, if not hundreds, of young women residents, all living dormitory-style as they're looking to crak the entertainment industry in one form or another. And they all seem to be somewhat man-hungry, too.

That's the basic premise for the plot, but in reality it's more like The Bellboy or The Errand Boy before it in that it's really an excuse for a whole bunch of not-closely-related sketches, which are hit-or-miss. There are also sketches which serve the purpose of bringing in a star for a cameo, most notably George Raft.

For me, the "plot" and many of the sketches in The Ladies Man didn't really work. But it did show that Lewis already had quite a bit of technical talent as a director. The mansion itself is a character, as it appears on many occasions as though it could have been inspired by the set of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, with long shots showing lots of the rooms on all three floors and the action being very carefully choreographed through the rooms and up and down those staircases. It's just a shame Lewis couldn't be directing other actors and/or off of somebody else's script.

Still, The Ladies Man is an interesting miss, and definitely worth the price considering how many movies the box set has.

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.

Cinderfella

With tomorrow being Thanksgiving and already having two posts planned for tomorrow, I thought about what to blog about as a suitable holiday movie. With that in mind, I got out my Jerry Lewis box set and put in the DVD of Cinderfella.

Jerry Lewis plays Cinderfella; at the start of the movie his father has just died and the will is being read. Dad's second wife, who is Fella's stepmother (Judith Anderson) inherits everything, including all the money and the palatial mansion, with a caveat that the money is supposed to used to help Fella. Stepmom and her two kids, Maximillion (Henry Silva) and Rupert (Robert Hutton) are at the reading; Fella is looking in through a window in the rain.

We learn further that Stepmom treats Fella terribly, forcing him to be their servant, doing all sorts of chores for them. They only tolerate his presence because they're convinced that his father buried a treasure somewhere on the estate and that Fella knows where it is; they want that money. Fella has dreams about the treasure but apparently doesn't know where it is.

One day, while Fella is cleaning the pool, suddenly showing up on a float in the pool is an odd man; how he got there is anybody's guess. That man is, of course, Fella's Fairy Godfather (Ed Wynn). In their conversation, Fella uses the word "persons", which Fella explains to his Godfather means some people are fancy and are "persons", while normal everyday folks like Fella are "people". Godfather implies that's going to change.

A news report mentions that Princess Charming (Anna Maria Alberghetti), from the Grand Duchy of Morovia, is going to be visiting the US; specifically she'll be an honored guest at a party that Stepmother is going to be putting on. Stepmother has the plan that she'll be able to marry off one of her sons to Charming, bringing them some much needed money. Fella, of course, is not to be invited to the party, although with the help of his Fairy Godfather, that's going to change.

The plot of Cinderfella is, unsurprisingly, one that's very easy to see where it's going, mostly because it was intended as a humorous take on the Cinderella story only with most of the roles switched in gender. Fella is indeed transformed and gets to go to the ball, but has to leave by midnight, leading to the climax and denouement....

But does this reimagining into Cinderfella work? Not as well as it might. The first half, setting up the who transformation and ball, it reasonably good, with a lot of opportunities for Lewis to do the sort of physical comedy for which he was known. Anderson and Wynn are also bright spots in support. However, the second half, with the ball, felt surprisingly sterile to me, and really brings the movie down a notch or two.

If I were going to recommend Jerry Lewis to people, the movie I'd start with isn't Cinderfella, but the other one it engendered: The Bellboy. The studio wanted to release Cinderfella as a feel-good summer movie, but Lewis thought it was a Christmas movie. The agreement they reached was that Lewis would make another film for summer release, and that movie was the big hit The Bellboy.

The Delicate Delinquent

I mentioned some time back picking up a box set of Jerry Lewis movies, having watched The Stooge off the set. I recently watched another DVD from the set, The Delicate Delinquent.

Lewis, who was about 30 at the time he made this movie, plays Sidney Pythias. He works as a sort of janitor/handyman at a tenement apartment building in a poor part of the city, presumably in exchange for the rent on his apartment since he's got a really poor basement apartment. One night, two groups of street hoodlums of the less threatening than they look sort that populated teen angst movies of the 1950s get together for a rumble in the alley at the back of the building where Sidney lives. Sidney makes the mistake of trying to put out the garbage just as the police are coming to arrest the juvenile hoodlums, so he gets taken in for booking too.

Now, it should have been fairly easy to establish that Sidney was not in fact part of either group of delinquents, but apparently he knew a couple of the members of one of the gangs, Artie (Richard Bakalyan) and Monk (Robert Ivers). This gets him kept in custody, although the policeman who arrested them all, Mike Damon (Darren McGavin), has some sympathy for Sidney.

This sympathy, combined with the presence of a do-gooder social worker, Martha (Martha Hyer), leads Damon to try to reform Sidney, since he seems more reformable than any of the other gang members. And for Sidney's part, he wants to be "reformed", at least in the sense that one of his goals in life is to better himself by becoming a policeman. Not that you'd think he could do the job, based on the way he does his handyman's job. But at least he could impress his girl Patricia enough.

Damon starts working with Sidney, and finds that getting him through the police academy is going to be more difficult than he thought, this being almost 30 years before the Police Academy series showed us that almost anybody can make it through the academy. Damon isn't helped by the fact that Artie and Monk think he's selling out and that becoming a policeman is a bad idea.

Somehow, however, Sidney gets accepted into the police academy, and goes through all the training before he's sent out on his first patrol with an experienced police officer. But things go wrong on that first patrol, threatening to end Sidney's police career before it even really begins....

Whether you like The Delicate Delinquent will depend a lot on whether you like the comedy of Jerry Lewis. This is the first movie he made without Dean Martin, who apparently was originally cast in the role Darren McGavin wanted, but in not wanting to play it hastened the break-up of the comedy team. There's not quite as much of the manic, acquired-taste Lewis comedy as there is in some of the other movies, but at the same time, that sort of comedy doesn't work within the context of the story the way it does in The Stooge.

As for my personal recommendation, I think I would start off with some other Lewis stuff, like The Bellboy.

Bill and Ted have an adventure

In my recent batch of Amazon purchases, I picked up this Jerry Lewis box set, since I think I'd only blogged about one of the 10 movies in it, and the price was more than right. Recently, I sat down to watch one of the movies in the set, The Stooge.

The movie starts off with Jerry's comic partner at the time, Dean Martin. he plays Bill Miller, part of a vaudeville "double" act (that is, an act with two people) circa 1930. He wants to find success as a "single", although people around him advise him against this, including his manager Leo (Eddie Mayehoff) and his wife Mary (Polly Bergen), who even feels a bit neglected by Bill.

Sure enough, Bill's attempts to be a single are not a success, and his manager suggests he get a "stooge", that is, somebody who can sit in the audience and yell out some pre-arranged heckling for the guy up on stage to riff off of and make the act much funnier. Cut to Ted Rogers (that's Jerry Lewis if you somehow couldn't recognize him). He works on Tin Pan Alley for a music publisher, but it's a wonder he hasn't been fired multiple times over. His boss would be happy to have him leave for greener pastures, so it's suggested that Ted could be the stooge.

Ted sits up in a box with a woman nicknamed "Frecklehead" (Marion Marshall), and when he starts interacting with Bill, the repartee turns out to be a big hit. The two go on the road, but Bill continues to think of himself as a single, never identifying Ted by name, since he believes that doing so would give away the fact that Ted is a stooge and it's all scripted. This despite the fact that all the critics are naming Ted. Mary and Frecklehead tell Ted that Bill is exploiting him, but Ted just wants the act to work.

The Stooge is one of those movies where it's pretty darn obvious exactly where the movie is headed, but where you don't mind because the fun is in getting there. If you don't like Jerry Lewis' manic style, then you may not like the movie, but otherwise I think it's a perfectly fine film.

As for the box set, it's well constructed for the price. There are 10 DVDs, so each movie gets its own DVD. It's in a case thicker than your average single DVD case, with one movie on a spindle on the inside left, one on the inside right, and the other eight on four inserts that attach to hinges within the case. Each of the inserts has two spindles which are not directly back to back; in other words, one of the DVDs on each insert is closer to the top of the case and the other closer to the bottom. Apparently some of the movies have extras, although I wasn't looking out for those on The Stooge.

The Stooge is good enough that it's worth watching on its own, but in a box set at this price point, it can't be beat.

I should live so long

There's something to be said for living long enough where you no longer have to give a damn what anybody else thinks, leaving you to say the most insane stuff that pops into your mind. Seven-time Oscar nominee Quincy Jones (six for music, once for co-producing The Color Purple) recently gave an interview to Vulture, in which there's some delightfully batty stuff. There's an interesting bit about taking on too much with The Color Purple since he was co-producing in addition to the score, but the best bit, and the one that's getting a lot of news, is about Marlon Brando:

[Marlon] Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherfucker you ever met. He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.

Supposedly, Pryor's widow confirms this. Now, I tend not to care about Hollywood relationships, but the thought of Pryor and Brando getting it on is, well, disturbing, especially if it's late, bloated-era Brando. Not because of the homosexuality; I don't find the rumors about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott disturbing at all. It's more the mental picture of the fat Brando getting it on with somebody coke-addled, or getting it on with anything. Try imagining fat Brando and the older Shelley Winters doing it. [shudders]

Anyhow, read the interview, as they say. And for some bonus elderly insanity, he's the Jerry Lewis interview with EWTN:

Edited because I forgot to name Quincy Jones as the interview subject! (It's been a long week.)

Jerry Lewis, 1926-2017

Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy (1960)

The death has been announced of actor Jerry Lewis, who died this morning at his home in Las Vegas at the age of 91.

Lewis is known for a lot, which is unsurprising considering his career lasted close to seven decades. The first big thing was the pairing with Dean Martin that led to a series of comedic films in the 1950s until their acrimonious breakup. Lewis continued to act in zany comedies such as the pictured The Bellboy as well as The Nutty Professor.

But of course, he also became the spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, hosting their annual Labor Day telethon which ran for decades, lasting 21 hours from Sunday night through the dinner hour on Monday. I think it was only after Lewis was let go that they started to truncate the broadcast since telethons are really part of another era; a few years ago the telethon was finally discontinued. But for those of us born after Lewis' string of comedic successes, it's probably with the Labor Day telethon that we first remember him. (And he was famously reunited with Dean Martin on the telethon.)

Of course, Lewis continued to act, with one of his memorable turns being as a late-night talk show host who gets kidnapped by Robert de Niro in The King of Comedy.

I don't know if TCM has planned a tribute, and to be honest it might be a bit tough considering that a lot of the movies he made were at Paramount. And besides, I doubt they've had time to announce it considering how recent the news is.

The King of Comedy

A movie I watched over the weekend that does seem to be avaliable (and in print) on DVD and Blu-Ray is The King of Comedy. Due to that availability, I feel comfortable doing a full-length post on the movie.

Jerry Lewis plays Jerry Langford, who is the most popular late-night TV talk show host in the country. His New York-based show is so popular that he's got a whole bunch of groupies who crowd the entrance to the studio where he does the show. One evening as he comes out of the studio after a show, not only are they mobbed at the entrance; one of the fans, Masha (Sandra Bernhard) has somehow gotten into his car. (How she did this considering there's a chauffeur, is a mystery.) She harasses Jerry, who is unsurprisingly uncomfortable about it. But he's fortunate in that somebody else pulls her out of the car.

That someone is Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), another big fan. Rupert would like to be a stand-up comedian, and to that end has been working on his act, although apparently he's never actually done stand-up in front of a live audience. Indeed, he lives with his mother over in New Jersey, and does his routines in front of a cardboard audience, as well as doing stuff on a cardboard version of the Jerry Langford Show set. Still, he tells Jerry about his dream, and even tries to get an audience with Jerry for a possible audition to appear on the show. Jerry, basically to get the guy away from him, says to call his secretary at the office.

Rupert, pushy and deluded blankety-blank that he is, goes to the Langford offices and says he already has an appointment to see Jerry, which is of course not true. Given the difficult task of dealing with Rupert and getting him to just go away is Jerry's personal assistant Cathy (Shelley Hack), who eventually takes an audition tape from Rupert and says she'll listen to it. A few days later back at the office, Cathy tells him the tape wasn't good enough, and to get some experience on the stand-up circuit.

Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Or two groupies scorned. Rupert has been telling Masha he has an in with Jerry. Well, not just Masha, but also Rita (Diahnne Abbott), a girl he knew from high school. Indeed, Rupert has been so pushy that he takes Rita to Jerry's house out on Long Island for the weekend, something which Jerry obviously didn't approve of. Eventually, Rupert is unable to take the rejection, and comes up with a plan: he and Masha will kidnap Jerry, and hold him hostage until Rupert gets to appear on the Jerry Langford Show. And they'll keep him hostage until the show actually goes over the air.

The King of Comedy, despite its title, isn't really a comedy. There are some comic moments, but in general it's more of a drama than a comedy. It's a movie I found difficult to watch at times, if only because the Rupert Pupkin is written to be such an arrested-development case that I just wanted to reach through the screen and smack him upside the head. He's an utter jerk, and at times unsympathetic. Jerry Lewis, on the other hand, is excellent. He's nothing like the manic character he played in all those comedies with Dean Martin, and then throughout the 1960s. He's restrained and in some ways bitter, and plays it very well. Bernhard is also quite good, although I think her character is a bit underused.

Also making the movie worth watching are the cameos. Ed Herlihy plays himself as Jerry Langford's announcer. Fred De Cordova, who was the director on The Tonight Show, plays the producer of the Jerry Langford Show. Tony Randall gets to play himself as a substitute host for Jerry's show, and gets to do his stickler for elegance thing. Joyce Brothers also appears, as does Liza Minnelli (I think it's just her voice, although we see a cardboard cutout of her on Rupert's set).

If you haven't seen The King of Comedy before, I can highly recommend it.

Jerry Lewis at 90

Tomorrow is going to be the 90th birthday of comic actor Jerry Lewis. Of course, I'm of the age where my first exposure to Lewis would have been the annual Labor Day telethon that he emceed to raise support for research into the fight against muscular dystrophy, this back in the day when telethons were a thing in the US. The MDA telethon was probably the biggest of them all, running 21-1/2 hours from 9:00 PM Sunday night to 6:30 PM the next day, although there were breaks for Jerry and his assorted guests out in Las Vegas when the local stations would run segments. In the age of the Internet and the 500-channel cable universe, there just doesn't seem to be a place for telethons any longer, and the MDA onsistently shortened its own telethon to the point where it was just in the evening hours, finally cancelling it altogether after 2014. Lewis had been replaced as host several years before all that. But it was on the telethon back in 1976 where Jerry Lewis was reunited with his old comedy partner Dean Martin, courtesy of their mutual friend Frank Sinatra. (Being Jerry Lewis and working out of Vegas, he apparently had considerable pull.)



Anyhow, TCM is celebrating Lewis with two nights of his movies, and the TCM website says the Jerry himself is actually co-hosting. Tonight's first night of the salute will see a night of Lewis' films with Dean Martin, while tomorrow will see some of the movies Lewis made after the split. (The Day the Clown Cried is not on the schedule.)