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.