BEFORE: OK, I skipped yesterday, that's a big deal for me. I'm only watching 6 movies this week, not 7 or 8. I have to slow down before I run out of slots for the year, or else I'll have to take the whole month of September off, and I don't think I can go that long without watching a new movie.
Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. carry over from "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me".
THE PLOT: Chronicles the remarkable life and genius work of one of the most iconic and incomparable comic performers and filmmakers of our time.
AFTER: As I mentioned the other day, it's been almost five years since Jerry Lewis died, and he lived the longest out of the group of entertainers I've been covering this week. I know Jerry wasn't a member of the Rat Pack, but I've kind of circled back to Martin & Lewis here, so out of that group of comedians, he was kind of like the Betty White, he outlived the others.
Jerry Lewis is one of those stars that you're probably not supposed to talk any trash about, because of all the charity work he did and all those Labor Day telethons he hosted, but it kind of seems that if you paint too rosy a picture of anyone, perhaps you're not telling the whole story. Are we just going to assume, for example, that the break-up with Dean Martin was all Dean's fault? Or are we just going to gloss over that, shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, these things happen!"
Of course, this film is only an hour long, so it's impossible to cover EVERYTHING in a man's life, but it's a bit odd that there's no mention of Jerry's wife, or wives, here. I know he had kids, because Scotty Lewis appeared in "Dean Martin: King of Cool" and Jerry was also father to Gary Lewis, of Gary Lewis & The Playboys. Ah, a little research tells me that Jerry was married to Patti Palmer in 1944, and they had six sons, one of which was adopted. They were married for 36 years, but got divorced in 1980, it seems like Jerry Lewis openly pursued other women during that marriage, he claimed in an interview to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. Wait, what? In his dreams, maybe... Then Jerry got married again in 1983 to Sandra Pitnick, and they were together until he died in 2017. I wonder if he was more faithful the second time around...there were sexual assault allegations against him that took place in the 1960's, so I wonder if Jerry would have been cancelled if the #metoo movement had been around back then.
There's plenty of material here about Jerry learning the craft of filmmaking by paying attention to how his first few films were directed by Frank Tashlin, and he mentions wanting to learn everything that every department in the production company did on each film, from costume and make-up to set-building and camera work. Before long Jerry took over as a director on his films, starting with "The Bellboy", "The Ladies Man", "The Errand Boy" and the classic "The Nutty Professor". When I was a kid I was a big fan of "The Family Jewels", a film in which Jerry played six or seven different characters, a bunch of brothers, one of whom needed to take charge of their orphaned niece, and the chauffeur who brought her to see all of them. I couldn't believe one man could play all those different roles, but I was probably six years old and easily impressed - it's just make-up and different costumes and voices, after all.
I think I programmed this documentary after confusing it with "The Day the Clown Cried", which is a film Jerry Lewis directed in 1972 about a clown that got imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II. I've heard both good and terrible things about that film, but apparently Jerry Lewis had the only copy of the film locked in a private vault to keep it from ever being viewed again. It's a shame, because years later the film "Life Is Beautiful" received great critical acclaim for a somewhat similar subject, and won three Oscars, it would be nice to compare and contrast, or wonder if the world just wasn't ready for that type of film in 1972.
But this documentary doesn't even mention "The Day the Clown Cried", but there is a lot of attention given over to French critics and directors, and it's almost a passé stereotype now to bring up the fact that Jerry Lewis was generally perceived as a comic genius in France, but just a goofy comic in the U.S. Why is that? I guess the French are still in touch with the aspects of silent comedy, which included a lot of physical humor - Chaplin was similarly regarded as a genius in France, but eventually the U.S. audiences wanted to move on to war movies, Westerns and zombie pictures, leaving the French sensibilities far behind. Or as a one-man writer/director/actor, he perfectly exemplifies the auteur theory of the French New Wave movement, take your pick. Meanwhile, U.S. critics saw the one-man film production as being somewhat self-indulgent, as Orson Welles was.
No matter what good you may do in the world, there are always going to be critics - some people even found fault with that MDA telethon Jerry hosted over the years, pointing out that the methods of the fund-raising techniques, by putting the children affected with muscular dystrophy on camera, seemed designed more to evoke pity than to empower the disabled. Well, it was a different time - but how else are you going to inform people watching at home about the severity of the disease, without putting the affected front and center? Activists, however, said that the telethons perpetuated stereotypes about the disabled, and perhaps did more harm than good in the long run. OK, so you DON'T want somebody on TV raising money to fight the disease, then? Jeez.
Also not mentioned in the documentary - Jerry Lewis taught film directing at USC in L.A. for a number of years. One of his most famous students was George Lucas, and sometimes Steven Spielberg sat in on classes, too. Where are George and Steve when you need them, to sing the praises of Jerry Lewis as a film production teacher? Instead we just get footage of Jerry as a teenager, working the clubs by making funny faces while pretending to sing along with a record, and act that he supposedly invented, but later got picked up by Andy Kaufman and others. Jerry Lewis was perhaps the link between the early director/actors like Chaplin, and the later ones like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.
There's another story I like, which demonstrates the animosity between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, in the years after they ended their on-stage partnership. Dean bought a restaurant in Los Angeles in 1958, with a business partner, and re-named it Dino's Lodge. It appeared prominently in the opening of the TV show "77 Sunset Strip". It was a popular place that served Italian food, in wood-paneled rooms that looked like somebody's den, and outside there was a big neon sign with Dean's face. Dean frequented the place, of course, and sometimes brought Sinatra along, and they'd pose for photos with the diners. As a swinging place, they served an early morning breakfast between 1 and 5 am.
But in 1961, Jerry Lewis wooed Dean's business partner away, and opened up Jerry's, a copycat restaurant three blocks away. Outside Jerry's was a big neon sign with Jerry's face on it, and Jerry lured away top chefs from Dino's, along with the maitre d' and half of the waiters. Jerry would frequent his restaurant, bring along his celebrity friends, and they'd pose for photos with the diners. Dean got fed up with this, and left the business, but the new owners of Dino's kept the name and his face on the sign, Dean sued to get his name off the place but lost. Jerry's restaurant folded in the mid-1960's, but the new owners kept Dino's running until 1970 or so, but the two former friends were business rivals for a while, and this probably drove that wedge between them in even further. If you're a restaurant owner, there's probably nobody you hate more than the person who owns the competing restaurant just down the street. To be fair, Jerry could have opened up his namesake restaurant anywhere, but he chose the same street in the same part of town. Just saying. And neither restaurant lasted very long as a result, so I guess there's a moral in there somewhere.
Also starring Pierre Étaix, Sean Hayes (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Frank Krutnik, Rae Beth Gordon, Tony Lewis, Shaun Micallef, Ted Okuda, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project")
with archive footage of Robert Benayoun, Dick Cavett (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), James Stewart (ditto), Charles Chaplin (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Robert De Niro (also last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Brian Donlevy, Milton Frome, Jean-Luc Godard, Oliver Hardy, Irving Kaye, Mike Kellin, Stan Laurel, Danny Lewis, Louis Malle, Everett Sloane, Frank Tashlin.
RATING: 5 out of 10 pratfalls
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