The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (249 page)

His own films lack exactly those assets a Thalberg henchman might have been expected to command—narrative directness and boxoffice accuracy (he was dropped from
Madame Curie
). On the contrary, arty aspiration showed like a teenage slip. His own scenarist, he cultivated a garish sophistication—in subject, setting, style, and actors—and sometimes achieved real vulgarity. But his first four films are all worth seeing: the first for George Sanders; the second, his best, for Hurd Hatfield and an absorbing contrast of soft, burnished close-ups and huge, interior perspectives; the third for its inane pleasure in literariness; and the fourth because it is gaudily ridiculous, impressive in a romantic, thundery way. In such moments as Ava Gardner in her nightie on the edge of a cliff, romantic sensation comes inadvertently near the vision of Delvaux and Ernst.

Jerry Lewis
(Joseph Levitch), b. Newark, New Jersey, 1926
1960:
The Bellboy
. 1961:
The Ladies’ Man; The Errand Boy
. 1963:
The Nutty Professor
. 1964:
The
Patsy
. 1965:
The Family Jewels
. 1966:
Three on a Couch
. 1967:
The Big Mouth
. 1969:
One More Time
. 1970:
Which Way to the Front?/Ja, Ja, Mein General! But Which Way to the Front?
. 1981:
Hardly Working
. 1983:
Cracking Up/Smorgasbord
.

The first six films directed by Lewis deserve a place in any study of American comedy—even if
The Nutty Professor
is also the most disturbing version of the Jekyll and Hyde story. It shows the somber side of Lewis’s imagination usually obscured by sentimentality. It seems to reflect on Lewis’s own appearance and the pain of all those disparaging asides in his partnership with Dean Martin.

Lewis maintained the American comic preoccupation with the little man beset by an incomprehensible, heartless, or intractable world. Keaton responds with disdain, Harry Langdon daydreams, Stan Laurel muddles through, while Chaplin practices all the guile and simpering of a waiter who plans to whip away the fat man’s chair. Jerry Lewis’s response is as novel as it is alarming: he becomes demented. In part, this is a clever exaggeration of a disposition toward cross-eyed goofiness, a tongue tied in knots, and a shambling walk. But no other performer went so far in suggesting a man animated by machinery or by the processing of human instincts implicit in advertising.

Lewis’s period with Frank Tashlin was instrumental in drawing out this gibbering, spastic automaton. It also seems to have inspired Lewis to direct himself, and to see his character as not just the pathetic jerk patronized by Dean Martin, but as a Stan Laurel hero discomposed by every convenience of modern life. Just as Tashlin’s movies are cartoon distortions of a world twisting to see itself in deceiving mirrors, so Lewis is adman’s man, a robot degenerate overprogrammed by the conflicting gods of Americana, made schizoid by the clash of material luxuries and abstract ideals.
The Nutty Professor
deals with transformation and the side-by-side images of the loony scientist, timid, inept, sentimental, but inventive, and Buddy Love, the caricature of the Dean Martin “Dino” figure, a blasé stud, relaxed, insolent, and decadent. Lewis had nursed
The Nutty Professor
for ten years—from the period of his partnership with Martin—and it shows the troubled, naïve vein of seriousness on which his comedy is based.

In 1946, Lewis and Martin formed a nightclub act that Hal Wallis later transferred to the movies. Their films together were broken affairs if only because the two men were at such odds: Lewis seemed hurt by Martin’s callousness, just as Martin was offended by the proximity of a slob. That they prospered was due to Paramount’s plugging, hard work, and the support of a largely juvenile audience:
My Friend Irma
(49, George Marshall);
My Friend Irma Goes West
(50, Hal Walker);
At War With the Army
(51, Walker);
That’s My Boy
(51, Walker);
Sailor Beware
(52, Walker);
Jumping Jacks
(52, Norman Taurog);
The Stooge
(53, Taurog);
Scared Stiff
(53, Marshall);
The Caddy
(53, Taurog);
Money from Home
(53, Marshall);
Living It Up
(54, Taurog);
Three Ring Circus
(54, Joseph Pevney);
You’re Never Too Young
(55, Taurog);
Artists and Models
(55, Tashlin);
Pardners
(56, Taurog); and
Hollywood or Bust
(56, Tashlin).

Lewis’s range grew as the series went on, and
Hollywood or Bust
was an advance in Tashlin’s matching of the idiot with the idiotic American dream—with Jerry’s glasses knocked askew by Anita Ekberg’s boobs. When the partnership ended, Lewis was able to carry on solo. His films with Tashlin enlarged his skill as much as his ambition:
The Delicate Delinquent
(57, Don McGuire);
The Sad Sack
(57, Marshall);
Rock-a-Bye Baby
(58, Tashlin);
The Geisha Boy
(58, Tashlin);
Don’t Give Up the Ship
(59, Taurog); and
Visit to a Small Planet
(60, Taurog).

Once he was directing himself, Lewis mixed his own projects with appearances in other people’s films:
Cinderfella
(60, Tashlin), where his rabid pathos eliminated much of Tashlin’s original satire;
It’s Only Money
(62, Tashlin);
Who’s Minding the Store?
(63, Tashlin);
The Disorderly Orderly
(64, Tashlin);
Boeing Boeing
(65, John Rich);
Way … Way Out
(66, Gordon Douglas);
Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River
(68, Jerry Paris); and
Hook, Line and Sinker
(69, Marshall).

But by 1967, Lewis’s momentum faltered.
Three on a Couch
had marked his departure from Paramount. Is it possible that an insecurity in Lewis needed a solid base? Was he also growing too old to carry off his late-teenage image of gauche destructiveness? Indeed,
One More Time
was made without his presence as an actor, but with the savorless Salt and Pepper—Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford.

Lewis is still a household name in America—loved or loathed—because of his annual Labor Day telethon on behalf of children with muscular dystrophy. Few other occasions say so much about America, and surely the event would have lapsed but for Lewis’s commitment to it. It is an orgy of money and sentimentality on the one hand; and on the other, a ponderous, tasteless reflection of a country of huge wealth and boundless idealism. Lewis puts a year of energy into its twenty-four hours, and the event catches all his contrary moods—inspired clowning, trained imbecility, the breakdown of language as fatigue grows, and the heavy, maudlin boasting about feeling. The pressure of solemnity on a fragile intellect may be just as evident in Lewis’s unreleased movie,
The Day the Clown Cried
. It was shot in 1974 and finished a year later, but legal problems or someone’s reticence kept it back. It is not a comedy; it is about a circus clown employed by the Nazis to assist in the killing of children in concentration camps.

To live in America is to experience the native incredulity at Lewis being taken seriously. Few things are held against the whole of France more fiercely than French love of Lewis. He is hardly a filmmaker now. The telethon has been Lewis’s annual movie, his life, and his show—and there in twenty-four hours one can still see the monster of his own sentimentality and the genius of timing—to say nothing of Buddy Love. In other words, Jerry Lewis has become not just an institution but a site, as lovely and/or depraved as Las Vegas, where the telethon has been done.

Surely Martin Scorsese was moved by this phenomenon in using Lewis in
The King of Comedy
—yet Lewis felt constrained in that film. He was a trussed-up straight man to De Niro and Sandra Bernhard. He has also acted in
Slapstick of Another Kind
(84, Steven Paul);
Fight for Life
(87, Elliot Silverstein); and
Cookie
(89, Susan Seidelman). For TV, he was very good for a season as Eli Sternberg, a veteran in the garment business, in
Wiseguy
(88–89).

In later years, he has been seen in
Arizona Dream
(93, Emir Kusturica) and
Funny Bones
(95, Peter Chelsom). But he had many health problems and an unflagging ego. In 2009, he was awarded the Jean Hersholt award by the Academy. One day, I hope, there will be a great book on Jerry Lewis in which the twinning of a monster and a mensch is made clear. Somehow, he and Dean remain at the heart of the Hollywood mystery.

Joseph H. Lewis
(1907–2000), b. New York
1937:
Navy Spy
(codirected with Crane Wilbur);
Courage of the West; The Singing Outlaw
. 1938:
The Spy Ring; Border Wolves; The Last Stand
. 1939:
Two-Fisted Rangers
. 1940:
Blazing Six Shooters; Texas Stagecoach; The Man from Tumbleweeds; Boys of the City; The Return of Wild Bill; That Gang of Mine
. 1941:
The Invisible Ghost; Pride of the Bowery; Criminals Within
. 1942:
Arizona Cyclone; Bombs over Burma; The Silver Bullet; Secrets of a Co-Ed; The Boss of Hangtown Mesa; The Mad Doctor of Market Street
. 1944:
The Minstrel Man
. 1945:
My Name Is Julia Ross
. 1946:
So Dark the Night; The Jolson Story
(codirected with Alfred E. Green). 1947:
The Swordsman
. 1948:
The Return of October
. 1949:
Undercover Man; Deadly Is the Female/Gun Crazy
. 1950:
A Lady Without Passport
. 1952:
Retreat—Hell!; Desperate Search
. 1953:
Cry of the Hunted
. 1954:
The Big Combo
. 1955:
A Lawless Street
. 1956:
7th Cavalry
. 1957:
The Halliday Brand
. 1958:
Terror in a Texas Town
.

Joseph Lewis is one of the pleasures of watching abbreviated movies on late-night television, interrupted by commercials so that scrappy plots sometimes begin to separate like reproducing amoebae. His films are mostly disreputable second features, bought for television in job lots. In no proper sense did Lewis ever make it. But
My Name Is Julia Ross, Undercover Man, Gun Crazy, The Big Combo, A Lawless Street, The Halliday Brand
, and
Terror in a Texas Town
are better than you will expect, adept at catching character in action, skillfully conveying underlying mood and violence while dispensing cliché plot lines.

There is no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films. But the plunder he came away with is astonishing and—here is the rub—more durable than the output of many better-known directors.
Julia Ross
with Dame May Whitty blithely tolerating her maniac son, George Macready, is not much less disturbing than
Strangers on a Train. Gun Crazy
is as odd as pairing John Dall and Peggy Cummings, and
The Big Combo
is as beautiful or noir as John Alton ever shot. Joseph Lewis never had the chance to discover whether he was an “artist,” but—like Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher—he has made better films than Fred Zinnemann, John Frankenheimer, or John Schlesinger.

Juliette Lewis
, b. Los Angeles, 1973
Juliette Lewis’s is an actual, if extreme career, and I can give you its outline facts. But I can’t help regarding her as something beyond the real—as some mythic or warning enterprise. For she is—it seems to me (and this is all in the eye of the beholder)—a fidgety, pouting, perfect example of what appeals to voyeurism. She is an image animated by the wicked thrill of being seen, looked at, and her own thrill is generated by some intuitive measuring of our guilty pleasure. She is of age now, but she was established first as a kind of Lolita, with a knowingness that was not permissible, and as a breed of illicit spectacle. What child has ever had darker or blunter eyes, or a mouth more filled and sated with intimations of our desire?

I know, it is not common or proper to talk about real people—professionals!—like this, much less in an apparent work of reference. But this is a book about response, and I cannot escape my own feeling of awe and dismay at seeing Lewis. For it carries not just the certainty that she is inspired, or magical, or understanding, but the anticipation of a Humbert Humbert and the father of daughters. Watching her, I feel like the George C. Scott character in
Hard Core
, or like the cineaste who has at last reached the back of the cave where ghosts grow on the wall like the slime of geology.

She is the child of the supporting actor Geoffrey Lewis. Her parents divorced and Lewis was apparently allowed to live on her own while still in her early teens. God knows whether she was “educated,” or whether many of us could live with the knowledge she has picked up. For she has worked steadily, and almost willfully on the borders of derangement and abandon: at twelve, it is said, in a TV movie,
Home Fires;
a bit in
My Stepmother Is an Alien
(88, Richard Benjamin);
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
(89, Jeremiah S. Chechik);
A Family for Joe
(90, Jeffrey Melman); outstanding as the fifteen-year-old who ends up on Death Row in
Too Young to Die?
(90, Robert Markowitz);
Crooked Hearts
(91, Michael Bortman); getting a supporting actress nomination and being the complicit dancer to some of De Niro’s most Satanic weavings in
Cape Fear
(91, Martin Scorsese);
That Night
(92, Craig Bolotin); excellent in
Husbands and Wives
(92, Woody Allen); close to human tenderness in
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
(93, Lasse Hallström); a wanton psychopath, with Brad Pitt, her companion in life then, in
Kalifornia
(93, Dominic Sena); eyebait for slaughter in
Romeo Is Bleeding
(94, Peter Medak); one of the
Natural Born Killers
(94, Oliver Stone);
Mixed Nuts
(94, Nora Ephron); as poisoned purity in
Strange Days
(95, Kathryn Bigelow);
From Dusk Till Dawn
(96, Robert Rodriguez).