Jerry Lewis is a spaz, or at least his on-screen persona was; I learned this last night after watching the third (well fourth, actually, see below) film in the UW Cinematheque Frank Tashlin retro, the penultimate Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin film,
Artists and Models (1955). This is actually my first real experience with Jerry Lewis, well, if you don’t count his work on the Labor Day telethons or the parody of the Professor from
The Simpsons, and his work with Tashlin were the works that I most looked forward to in this retro. The film, a very funny comedy-musical, which also stars Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine, did not disappoint.
Artists and Models pretty much soldified Tashlin’s status in my personal pantheon of directors, even though it seemed to me to have less pointed social satire, which seems to matter less when you have such inspired comedy.
The story of
Artists and Models is simple and endearingly goofy. Rick Todd (Dean Martin) and Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis) are childhood friends and roommates in a Greenwich Village flat. Rick is an unsuccessful, womanizing painter, and Eugene is an aspiring children’s book writer, who is also addicted to comic books. Living above them is Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone), a successful artist, comicbook illustrator, and creator of Eugene’s favorite comic book
Bat Girl, and her roommate, Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine), her (ironically) astrology and numerology obsessed Bat Girl model. She also works as a secretary for Mr. Murdock, Abigail’s publisher. Under the influence of comic books, Eugene talks in his sleep, spinning outlandish fantasy tales of Vincent the Vulture and his arch-nemesis, Zuba, a three-eyed space woman. Since he has a tendency to scream out his stories, one night his landlady, comes to their door and tells them there was a complaint from the tenants in 4A. Eugene goes upstairs to apologize; Abigail, though dissatisfied with her career, is sketching Bessie, who tells her that the stars tell her she will meet her Mr. Right that night. Bessie, in full Bat Girl costume, answers the door and startles Eugene. Bessie sets her sights on Eugene. The next day, Abigail quits her comic book job, and Rick, thinking he can get a job at Mr. Murdock’s publishing company, chances to meet her. While he attempts to woo the resistant Abigail, Bessie begins her aggresive pursuit of Eugene in earnest. Rick also manages to scam his way into Mr. Murdock’s employment. Bereft of stories of his own, he simply listens to Eugene’s outlandish stories and uses them as a basis for his own comic book. Coincidentally, part of Eugene’s story contains a secret US government formula for a rocket fuel; the Secret Service (or FBI, it’s not that clear) pursues Rick and Eugene, as well as some Communist agents, headed by Sonia (Eva Gabor), a Hungarian agent. Let’s just say wackiness ensues, as Sonia tries to seduce first Rick, and then, costumed as Bat Girl, Eugene; however, while Rick is in cahoots with the government, he can’t tell Eugene or Abigail, since they turned to the side of the anti-comic book crusade (the film’s main point of social satire is the 1950s hysteria over comic books, similar references appear in
Rebel Without a Cause; check out this link
here for a history of comic book censorship in the mid 1950s. This made the comic book stuff very contemporary; the movie even features a panel discussion featuring an academic and child psychologist, Jerry also participates, see below).
Jerry Lewis is of course the centerpiece of the film, a brilliant physical comedian, his Eugene is a spastic, manic man-child, seemingly afflicted by simulatneously by ADD and Tourette’s Syndrome (at one point of the film is he held up as the unfortunate result of reading too many comic books, and refers to himself as a “retard,” and “so slow I took Summer School in the Winter.”), but he is ably matched by Dean Martin’s smooth charisma as the duo’s straight man (who sings quite a bit in the film), and even more well matched by the waifish and adorable Shirley MacLaine, who is willing to match Lewis in the physical comedy and mugging department (after an AIM conversation with allyn, this morning, I realized just how much I like the early Shirley MacLaine). The highlight of their interaction is the the “Inamorata” song and dance routine; she aggressively pursues Eugene and serenades him as he tries to go to the rooftop to sunbathe. It’s hilarious, as he panics, they weave back and forth, she always blocking his route, and whenever she hits a high note in her song, her brassy voice immediately causes Eugene to spaz out and drop everything he is carrying. The pratfalls are hilarious, and the sequence is accomplished is a few long takes (it’s also surprisingly intricately choreographed). Physical comedy is paramount in the film, other highlights include the massage scene that turns into a hilarious game of Twister, the attack of a comic addled adolescent who throws letter openers at Eugene and demands “blood,” the scene where Eugene has to run up and down the stairs conveying two halves of a telephone conversation. The exhausted Eugene has to communicate the final message with increasingly elaborate charades and ends up falling in the tub. Then there is the whole ending, as Eugene and Rick fend off Communist spies by dropping suits of armor on them (they march/stumble down the stairs like they are animated), or when Eugene displays his pugilistic skills against both the Communist agents and then the Secret Service agents who storm the Commie hideout, knocking out one after another as they come through the front door.
Physical comedy is not the films source of laughter. There are sight gags a plenty, and some great one-liners and verbal repartee. The whole “Fat Lady” vs “Bat Lady,” exchange is an equal of the “Whose on First” routine by Abbot and Costello. Then there is Bessie trying to explain her forays into numerology, after she has become disenchanted with astrology, but the results are the same (Eugene is the one). Another favorite comic monologue is delivered by Mr. Murdock who worries about he competition from TV with it’s ability to deliver blood and gore right into a person’s house and “in color!” He also has an ex-wife who still dominates him and a mistress (who is introduced at various times as his daughter, niece, and cousin) who does nothing but sit around and eat. My favorite joke in the whole movie was when the Secret Service is spying on Rick and Eugene; two agents watch from a window, one is standing up, the other has his face obscured by a camera with a long, long telephoto lens. The best part is that this unknown agent speaks with Jimmy Stewart’s voice and delivers the line “I can’t see much from this rear window.” The response at the screening was interesting, I started laughing at the joke about 10 seconds before everyone else, which I guess was kind of gratifying. (there are also other inside jokes, such as a reference to Dean Martin’s own single “That’s Amore,” and an appearance by Anita Ekberg, playing, well Anita Ekberg, among others). I guess he is pre-postmodern, and like another important 1950s director, Samuel Fuller, he is among the most forward looking directors of his time. Yeah, and there is a lot of Tashlin’s trademark bawdy humor; the film is a leg fetishists dream come true, all in Technicolor and Vistavision.
The screening was proceeded by one a Looney Tunes cartoon that Tashlin directed, the 1944
Booby Hatched, which I don’t believe I’ve seen before. The highlights of this cartoon is a droll, hiberanting bear (are there any other kinds, “So I layed an egg,” and “These dreams really begin to worry me.”) and a great sight gag where the Mother Duck examines her freezing eggs by latern light. We are treated to silhouette of a duckling warming himself with an oven, another is ice skating, and still another is ski jumping. The plot itself involves a hatchling, strangely named Robespierre, who can’t quite make it out of his egg (voiced by Mel Blanc, so he kind of sounds like a muffled Bugs Bunny); he gets lost, and his mother duck vies with the BB Wolf for her hatchling, which involves a lot of eye poking and surreptitious egg stealing. God forbid, but if anything ever happens to the US, I hope we are survived by one of our most important cultural works, the Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies (at least the pre-TV ones). They say more about America and the American condition than most anything else the US has produced.
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