When comedian Jerry Lewis died last year at the age of 91, his broad, rubber-faced clowning was considered strictly for children here in the States, but in 2006, France awarded him a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Many American critics like Pauline Kael wondered if there was something in France's water. "She's never said a good thing about me yet," Lewis lamented. "That dirty old broad. But she's probably the most qualified critic in the world."
While his movies still sold well at home and abroad, many of his viewers thought they had outgrown him once they had grown up and when his career started waning in the mid-1960s. In a radio gag from the 1990s, a French Beavis and Butt-Head declared, "Zees Zerry Loo-ees movie eees cool." On The Simpsons, two Frenchmen declare Lewis' familiar cry of "Hey, Laaaay-deeeee," "formidable!"
Now that Paramount is releasing a new 10-movie boxed set of his films on DVD, French film fans don't seem so crazy. The set includes Lewis' 1963 masterpiece The Nutty Professor , his directorial debut The Bellboy (1960), as well as The Ladies Man (1961), The Patsy (1964), The Errand Boy (1961), The Delicate Delinquent (1957), Cinderfella (1960), The Family Jewels (1965) and his early pairing with Dean Martin from 1951, The Stooge.
To determine why Lewis' work deserves re-examination, it's worth also checking out Shawn Levy's 1996 biography King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. Levy has also documented the rise of Italian New Wave Cinema in Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome and has also written Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey and the Last Great Showbiz Party.
Contacted by phone from Portland, Levy says that there's a good reason why the French, the Germans and even the Australians recognized a gifted artist hiding behind Lewis' clown makeup. King of Comedy devotes an entire chapter to why Lewis' shtick resonated across the ocean.
"He and Dean Martin had become popular in 1948. In that 10 years, his original [American] audience had kind of thought of him as someone they had watched when they were kids, so they hadn't kept up with him," Levy says. "In Europe, they saw his films fresh. In the years between Jerry's debut as a director, auteur theory had developed in France, and they began looking at cinema differently, and Jerry debuted as director exactly at the time they were ripe to receive him. Physical comedy, and in the case of The Bellboy, almost wordless comedy, translates easily. It's much harder to translate a Preston Sturges screenplay (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels) or even some Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) movies than it is a sight gag."
THE GREAT TECHNICIAN
If critics in this country were slow to appreciate what Lewis had accomplished, American filmmakers weren't. The Bellboy may be short on dialogue, but it's not silent. Lewis created a series of clever gags involving sound effects coming from places where they shouldn't.
Lewis also changes filmmaking history by developing a technique called "video assist." Jerry Lewis the director had to know if Jerry Lewis the actor was hitting his marks so the gags worked on camera. By using closed circuit television monitors, he was able to save time and money. He also ordered unique sets that existed nowhere in live action movies.
"He was a camera bug. He loved tech," Levy says. "The sets in The Ladies Man, impossible in real life, but in cartoons, we see that all the time. That has been really influential. The submarine in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a Wes Anderson film, was explicitly modeled after The Ladies Man. Wes Anderson has said so.
"(Francis Ford) Coppola as a young man was on the set of The Ladies Man, and he did something similar in One From the Heart, which he directed as a live film with multiple cameras where the fourth wall wasn't a restriction."
Thematically, Lewis movies may also deserve a second look. In addition to making an enormous hit for himself and inspiring another one for Eddie Murphy, The Nutty Professor questions what makes someone beautiful or ugly or even good or evil. Lewis and co-screenwriter Bill Richmond reworked Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the shy, nerdy Professor Julius Kelp (Lewis) has an alter ego named Buddy Love (Lewis again), who is just as villainous as Mr. Hyde. Love, however, looks far different from the monsters that Frederic March and Spencer Tracy played.
"When we first see (Buddy Love), we don't really see him. We have the point-of-view camera walking toward the nightclub. The women are looking at us, and they're kind of fainting, and we think we're going to see a monster. But they're fainting because he's a hunk," Levy says. "(Lewis) often plays multiple characters in a movie. Professor Kelp is the G-rated Jerry. Buddy Love is the PG-13/R-rated Jerry. They're both in there."
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
It's fitting the new boxed set comes from Paramount because Lewis had an unusually free hand at the studio. If he requested the studio's financial support to make a working prototype for video assist or wanted the elaborate sets for The Ladies Man built, it happened.
Paramount studio head Barney Balaban once quipped, "If Jerry wants to burn down the studio I'll give him the match!"
Levy says there was a reason -- Lewis had an arrangement other filmmakers would envy. "He started working at Paramount when he was a contract player with (producer) Hal Wallis. Right from the beginning, his deal with Paramount was 'I do a picture for the studio/Hal Wallis and then I do a picture for me or me and Dean'," Levy explains. "On every other movie he was his own producer. As long as they were profitable, nobody cared. These were not Oscar pictures. They were not prestige releases. They were money makers. No one minded if Jerry experimented if they put $100 and got $120 out. That was the arrangement. Some of his pictures were extremely successful. They put $100 in, and they got $1000 out.
"He was getting multiple people's checks, and also he had been in a 12-year relationship with the studio that had produced nothing but hits, and half of those hits were pictures he had, in fact, produced. It wasn't like they were coming to someone like Robert Pattinson after Twilight and saying 'Here's the keys to the studio.'"
A HAPPY ENDING
Lewis left Paramount for Columbia after The Family Jewels, and had intermittent success in the years that followed. Some health problems didn't help.
"He chipped a bone on his vertebrae in his neck, and they couldn't perform surgery on it, and he wound up being an opioid addict. That destroyed his career, his life and his marriage," Levy says. But Lewis also raised millions to fight muscular dystrophy and gave an unforgettable performance as a beleaguered comic in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy. He also did a guest spot on The Simpsons in 2003, which enabled him to get the last laugh on his animated detractors.
Levy's book paints a warts and all portrait of the comic, but more than two decades later, he says Lewis sought and justly demanded attention. "In the case of Jerry Lewis, it was in 1993 when the idea of writing about him came into my head. His autobiography was 11 years old, and the (unflattering) Arthur Marx book was about 20 years old, and the Richard Gehman's book (That Kid) was 30 years old. None of them really told the story I really wanted to tell," Levy says.
When asked if he would have liked to cover the years that aren't in the book, Levy replies, "There was some talk of adding a chapter that would have brought the book into the 2010s. I was fortunate. I left him on a high note. He was touring the country in Damn Yankees when he was in his 70s. Things were looking up."
He adds, "His death was met with appreciation of a sort that he wouldn't have had if he had died in 1975. I think things turned for him."
MovieStyle on 06/01/2018