Jerry Lewis at Columbia Pictures

Do not go gentle into that good night

Jerry Lewis’s tenure at Columbia Pictures from 1966-1969 is mostly remembered as the period in which the most successful American comedian of the Eisenhower era finally lost his grip on the moviegoing public. Compared to the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when the twentysomething Lewis exploded in nightclubs, live television, and film with his comedy partner Dean Martin; or the early ‘60s when films like The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, and The Nutty Professor revealed him as a strikingly original director; or the evergreen industry of speculation surrounding his aborted early-‘70s film maudit, The Day the Clown Cried; or even his semi-comeback in the ‘80s, when his performance in The King of Comedy showed untapped dramatic depths, and late directorial efforts Hardly Working and Cracking Up emerged as auteurist fetish-objects, Lewis’s wobbly Late ‘60s has mostly evaded fan nostalgia or critical recuperation.

My rule of thumb for Jerry Lewis movies is: if it’s directed by Frank Tashlin or Lewis himself (or, sure, Martin Scorsese or Emir Kusturica), it’s always at least interesting; if it’s directed by Norman Taurog, George Marshall, or any of the other hapless traffic-cops assigned to wrangle Jerry, it’s probably lesser. This holds especially true of Lewis’s Columbia period, which offers some of the lowest low points in his long and chequered filmography. The less said about the dreary Jerry Paris-directed farce Don’t Lower the Bridge, Raise the River (1968) the better, and I still haven’t brought myself to watch Way… Way Out (1966), a space-age comedy he made on loan to 20^th Century Fox that has garnered precisely zero defenders. But surrounding these unambiguous failures are a handful of more personal films that reveal an artist seeking ways to stave off his obsolescence, but incapable of being anything but himself. If not exactly top-shelf Jerry, these flawed works are strong testaments to his immovable artistic personality, and productively develop certain aesthetic and thematic ideas introduced in his more celebrated work.

But first, a refresher on how we got here. Beginning with 1949’s My Friend Irma, Lewis and his comedy partner Dean Martin reigned as two of Paramount Pictures’ marquee stars, a streak that continued for Lewis as he smoothly transitioned to a solo career in 1956. His semiannual comedies were such reliable moneymakers for the studio that in 1959 he was rewarded with a contract unprecedented in Hollywood history: $10 million plus 60% of profit for 14 films across the next seven years. Such was Lewis’s standing at Paramount that Barney Balaban, head of production, told the press, “If Jerry wants to burn down the studio, I'll give him the match.” What a difference a few years would make.

1960 represented the summit of Lewis’s solo success: The Bellboy, shot in his spare time during a live engagement at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, became a monster hit that fulfilled his long-cherished ambition to become his own director. But signs that his popularity had crested appeared when pricey films like Cinderfella (1960) and The Ladies Man (1961) did not see a corresponding box office uptick. 1963 saw the high-profile embarrassment of The Jerry Lewis Show, a much-hyped prime-time talk/variety show that was cancelled after three months. That same year brought The Nutty Professor (1963), the film that many consider his artistic pinnacle, but this was also the last year that Lewis’s name appeared on U.S. theatre owners’ annual Top Ten Money Making Stars list. Subsequent films The Patsy (1964), The Disorderly Orderly (1964), and The Family Jewels (1965) delivered his softest-ever box office, while the middling bedroom farce Boeing-Boeing (1965) failed to reinvent him as a “grown-up” attraction. As 1965 drew to a close, the man who once held the matches to burn down Paramount was suddenly without a home.

Lewis was still a big enough star to quickly set up shop at Columbia, but his audience continued to wane for the rest of the ‘60s. Such a trajectory is not unusual: many of the screen comedians who were Lewis’s obvious forerunners – Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers – enjoyed about a decade of consistent commercial and artistic success before a rapid decline. Lewis held on for longer than most, but “the kid” turned 40 in 1966, and was inevitably growing less fit for the kind of broad physical comedy and childish characterisations that were the bedrock of his fame. Despite persistent reports of French intellectuals who considered Lewis a great artist, American critics en masse wrote him off as a kids-menu item after his split with Martin… but the kids who had become Lewis’s largest constituency were growing up and moving on to urbane wit of Mike Nichols and Woody Allen. Meanwhile, Mel Brooks, with whom Lewis shared a brief and ill-starred collaboration scripting The Ladies Man, would develop a cinematic style every bit as broad as Lewis’s that spoke more directly to the cultural upheavals of the time. Lewis was surely influenced by Brooks (and Chaplin) when he made his anti-Nazi comedy Which Way to the Front? (1970), but capital-P Political filmmaking was not in his blood. As writer/director, Lewis borrowed much from Frank Tashlin – his proto-Pop Art visual sense, his favouring of broad performance styles, his intermingling of “straight” storytelling with jarringly cartoon-like visual comedy – but did not share his mentor’s interest in social satire. His own most productive artistic terrain was the self, which he consistently depicted as weak and infinitely malleable.

That’s especially true of Three on a Couch (1966), his first Columbia film - on its surface a conspicuous attempt to mature his image. A rare Lewis directorial venture on which he didn’t take a writing credit, this light romantic comedy had been previously imagined as a vehicle for Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon, and the presence of Janet Leigh as leading-lady suggests an attempt to reach beyond Lewis’s increasingly school-aged core audience. Consciously or not, the result feels like Lewis’s attempt to synthesise the “mature” farce of Boeing-Boeing with the personal and aesthetic concerns of his Paramount films. In other words: this is what you get when someone with an abnormal brain tries to make a “normal” movie.

Let’s start with aesthetics. From the big-band swing music that blares over their opening credits to their garish, comic-book art direction, Lewis’s films pummel the senses. In Three on a Couch, the suave bachelor pad of painter Christopher Pride (Lewis) is furnished with a black leather couch, blood-red carpeting, multicolored kitchen cabinets, and a ragbag art collection of many styles and disciplines. His psychiatrist girlfriend Dr. Elizabeth Accord (Leigh) works out of a spartan office whose white walls are accented by strange mood lighting: red, green, orange, and fuschia.

Lewis’s chaotic sense of colour and design is matched by his framing and editing; exacting though he could be in his performances and in elements of film craft, I’m sometimes baffled by his choices in these other areas. In Three on a Couch, he favours tightly-composed shots of two or three people crowded into the frame, or long shots with the camera positioned at a distance, a foot or two over the actors’ heads, that capture their whole bodies as they milling about the set. Interspersed throughout these two basic visual strategies are strange and arbitrary attempts at arty framing, as in an early shot that portentously frames one of Leigh’s patients over her shoulder. Shots like these are striking individually, but tend to wreak havoc on Lewis’s editing rhythms. His compositional instincts are about 80% Charlie Chaplin, 20% Jean-Luc Godard.

Aimed at a middle-class adult audience, Three on a Couch finds Lewis on his best behaviour, sticking to a sturdy three-act structure and keeping the fourth wall firmly in place. And despite all that, this is his most insane film. Imagine a version of The Nutty Professor where Buddy Love is the hero. Like Buddy, Christopher Pride is Lewis’s conception of what a modern hepcat looks like, with cool clothes, brycleemed hair, and an ever-present cigarette or martini glass. He’s an up-and-coming artist who wins a coveted grant to live and work for a year in Paris, where he wants to marry and live with his psychiatrist girlfriend. Unfortunately, she is committed to treating three long-term patients, all of them female, all of them sharing the same irrational, deep-seated hatred of men. His solution: disguise as three different personae – a southern rancher, an athlete, and a nerd (plus the nerd’s sister) - to woo the patients, and ultimately cure their misandry. These characters give Lewis ample opportunity to engage in the kind of slapstick and mugging that were still very much expected of him, leading to mix-ups, shenanigans, and a lot of what might now be termed “gaslighting.” A climactic party scene with three patients are present leads to the touching conclusion, in which Christopher tells his beloved, “I only did it for you, honey. I did it because I love you.” The three patients, all cured, agree that he did the right thing.

Three on a Couch is one many Lewis films in which he appears in multiple guises. In some films he plays several distinct characters, and in others he plays one “anchor” character who wears disguises, but these “anchors” always disappear so completely into their roles that they render the distinction meaningless. In The Nutty Professor, our anchor is the nerdy scientist Julius Kelp, who creates a potion that turns him into the handsome, magnetic, but obnoxious Buddy Love. Lewis sees this as an act of self-deception, not self-actualization, and it leads Julius to an epiphany: “You might as well like yourself. Just think about all the time you're going to have to spend with you.” Critics since time immemorial have interpreted the Julius/Buddy dynamic as Lewis’s jaundiced revisitation of his dynamic with Dean Martin, and while he always dismissed the comparison, the film undeniably collapses both parts of the team’s “handsome man and a monkey” dichotomy into one performer. Lewis (as both director and performer) clearly harbours complicated feelings towards both Julius and Buddy, rendering the nerdy hero abject while filming the cruel villain lovingly. That The Nutty Professor insists upon such a separation between Julius and Buddy suggests that Lewis was approaching certain truths about himself that he couldn’t bear to look at directly. He got a little closer three years earlier in The Bellboy, where he played both the meek, near-silent service worker Stanley and the wealthy and admired Hollywood movie star “Jerry Lewis.” That film reflects his intimate familiarity with both fame and obscurity, and suggests that the line between Stanley and “Jerry” is arbitrary, and largely defined by others. Later, and for many years, the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon would see Lewis unintentionally toggle between his Julius and Buddy personae for 24 straight hours.

Three on a Couch was about as financially successful as Lewis’s last few Paramount films, and Way… Way Out was an outright flop. For The Big Mouth (1967), Lewis recruited Bill Richmond, cowriter of many of his best Paramount films, to create what was essentially a throwback to that era. Here, Lewis plays Gerald Clamson, usually referred to as “Jerry” - a non-character who is exactly as smart, stupid, capable, or bumbling as any given scene demands. Neither a Buddy Love nor a Julius Kelp, “Jerry” looks, dresses, and speaks like Jerry Lewis - the closing credits even state “Gerald Clamson was Jerry Lewis” to underline this point. Unlike Jerry, “Jerry” is a humble middle-class salaryman who spends his working year awaiting his annual fishing trip - like Stanley in The Patsy, a persona weak enough to become anyone and anything. His malleability reminds me of something that Daniel Noah, director of Lewis’s last star vehicle, Max Rose (2013), said about Lewis upon his death:

“He could be warm. He could be wonderful. He could be mean. He could be vulnerable. He could be kind. He was so unbelievably complex. But he spoke often about, and he wrote about, his internal government: He knew there were many different people inside of him and the key to his success was that he realized when he was young that his job was to decide at any given moment which one of those people to put in the cockpit.”

The Big Mouth begins with “Jerry” fishing on a Florida beach, where he reels in the body of Syd Valentine - a wanted diamond-smuggler who is his exact doppelgänger. Valentine hands “Jerry” a map and, with his dying breaths, tells him of a diamond stash that he has hidden from the mob. The resemblance between Valentine and “Jerry” drives the (thin) narrative, but the most remarkable case of identity confusion comes when he checks into a hoity-toity hotel in the disguise of a bespectacled, bucktoothed, adenoidal nerd. This nerd character, who also goes by “Gerald Clamson,” is for all intents and purposes the same character as The Nutty Professor’s Julius Kelp. After becoming acquainted with the film’s leading-lady, “Jerry” agrees to a tennis date, but realizes he needs to brush up on his skills with a lesson. So he again dresses as the nerd to meet his (pretty, blonde) tennis instructor, but the ruse goes beyond disguise: he fully embodies the persona. On the court, he stumbles and bumbles and plays so ineptly that he seems to have forgotten why he is even there. “Jerry” completely disappears, and only the nerd remains.

The plot is a clothesline for an episodic series of set-pieces, gags, and non-sequiturs, very few of which play out in an orderly set-up/punchline rhythm. Typical is a scene where “Jerry,” fleeing gangsters, hides in a busy restaurant and explains his predicament to the dignified-seeming man whose table he has crashed. The man listens, long and considerately, until a couple of men approach the table and he starts barking orders at them. He then claims that he is the President of the United States, and the men, who are dressed in white, gently take him away to his facility. In a normal comedy, this punchline would be the end of the scene, but Lewis goes a few beats further: “Jerry” stays at the table, staring into space and babbling nonsense, then tears up a newspaper, crawls on top of the table, and starts spouting gibberish into the flower pot - apparently driven insane by the strange encounter. (This is a running gag: multiple characters are rendered mentally incapacitated after after startling encounters with “Jerry,” but only our hero makes a quick and complete recovery.)

Authorship for Lewis’s final Columbia film, Hook, Line and Sinker (1969), is murky. Columbia allowed Lewis to produce but forbade him from directing, insisting he was overextended. So Lewis hired George Marshall, a then-78-year-old journeyman whose 100+ credits included several Martin & Lewis films. In his biography King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis, Shawn Levy bluntly writes, “It was absurd: Jerry had written off Marshall as an old hack back in 1949 … Now, by hiring him, he was virtually flaunting his intention to supersede his director.” Levy’s speculation is certainly boosted by 1969 promotional film, which bears the revealing title Jerry Lewis: The Total Filmmaker and depicts its subject as king of the castle. The most telling evidence of Lewis’s authorship is in the art direction, which pushes his taste for Bigger, Louder, Brighter to some dizzying heights.

The story begins with Jerry as an ennui-stricken suburban father and husband, dissatisfied in his white-collar career, endless household responsibilities, and stagnant sex life. The inciting incident comes when his doctor (Peter Lawford) informs him he has only a few months to live, and his wife tells him he should spend it fishing and living the high life around the world. This kicks off a stream-of-consciousness plot where Lewis accumulates a forbidding debt before learning that he will actually live, and the best option is to fake his own death for the insurance money, but then he learn that Lawford is having an affair with his wife, and so on. The film is funniest in its first act, where Lewis and Co. swipe wholesale the general spirit and certain entire gags from that poet of domestic malaise, W.C. Fields (an early scene where Lewis tries to shave derives from It’s a Gift). But the laughs peter out in the second half, which spends too much time on Jerry wandering around in a ten-gallon hat and fake moustache - a joke that indulges his taste for disguises and mugging, but lacks the autobiographical resonance of his best work. For his part, Lewis is quoted in The Jerry Lewis Films as saying, “I was able to contribute a little, but not as much as I would have liked. And without a comedian’s input, any comedy film will suffer.” Perhaps he felt increasingly resigned working at a studio Columbia, and out of step in a year when the major releases included Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and The Wild Bunch.

Lewis’s long reign as a movie star ended with a brief and troubled stint at Warner Bros., which barely released his Which Way to the Front? After that was the well-documented fiasco that was his independently-produced The Day the Clown Cried, then a long period of inactivity. When he finally returned to cinema, it was with Hardly Working (1980), where he played a fired circus clown who fumblingly attempts to assimilate into the adult world. This flawed object is most rewardingly viewed (as Jonathan Rosenbaum proposed) as Lewis’s unconscious statement about his intransigence in the face of his diminished physical state and commercial decline. As if to underline the point, Lewis’s last feature, Cracking Up (1983, aka Smorgasbord), is a loose-knit collection of gags, many of them surprisingly dark, that made no concessions to the commercial expectations of 1983 or the traditional standards of a “well-made movie.”

This is probably as good a time as any to address the question: Is Jerry Lewis funny? I’ve felt differently at different times in my life. As a child in thrall to the rubberfaced antics of Jims Carrey and Varney, I loved Jerry as another manic, childlike comedian who made funny faces. When I reacquainted myself with his films as an undergraduate and read a bit of the highbrow critical analysis of them, I found him more interesting than ha-ha funny. But now? There’s a scene in Cracking Up where Lewis plays a 16th century Frenchman locked in the Bastille, where he spends 30 seconds, or maybe 60 seconds, or, I dunno, maybe a week just spouting gibberish in a French accent. Does this sound funny to you? It certainly makes me laugh. To appreciate Lewis at his most extreme, I think it helps to have seen enough comedy to feel a little jaded about it. Lewis proved in his early twenties that he could be as funny as anyone who ever lived - the blast of youthful energy and imagination that astonished ‘50s audiences is still palpable if you watch The Colgate Comedy Hour - and he spent much of his career seeking new textures in comedy. Often this meant extending a gag until its the duration became the point, like the restaurant scene from Cracking Up. Other times it meant crafting set-pieces that are often more beautiful than laugh-inducing: for example, the typewriter routine from Who’s Minding the Store? (1963), or the boardroom pantomime from The Errand Boy (1961), or the scene with the vases from The Patsy. A film like The Errand Boy can be a disorienting experience for the sheer density and variety of its humour - some scenes are long, some short, some clever, some stupid, some sentimental. For me, this is what makes Lewis’s films, even the weaker ones, so alive and inexhaustible.