Artists and Models

Will Sloan

What you need to understand is, these were the two best-looking guys to ever do comedy up to this point. They were certainly the only same-sex comedy duo with sexual chemistry (yes, I am aware that the Three Stooges slept in the same bed, but it’s not the same), and I’m sure that was very confusing and exciting to 1950s audiences for reasons suppressed and unknowable.There are still some Martin & Lewis movies I haven’t seen, but I’m confident saying that this deserves its reputation as the one with the most ideas beyond “Let’s put a camera in front of Jerry and have him do faces.” Compare this to The Caddy and… there’s no comparison. Frank Tashlin is very proto-Warhol in his “Isn’t all this disgusting stuff wonderful?” perspective on mass culture. At 109 minutes this is definitely about 20 minutes longer than ideal, but hey, I like every scene. In fact, there are some scenes in here that should be better remembered, like when Jerry gets a massage and gets tangled up.Odd that Jerry kept insisting that women aren’t funny when he literally shared the screen with Shirley MacLaine in this movie.

maneleeo4.0

This film deserves 4 stars just for that sequence where Shirley MacLaine sings "Innamorata" while Jerry Lewis tries to survive her love declaration.

Filipe Furtado4.5

Anti-comic book hysteria is really about they serving as an avenue out of puritan US sexual repression, how times have changed. So much style and colors, it is all very aesthetically controlled while allowing for a sense of performance freedom and hangout among people who enjoy each other (even though by most accounts Martin and Lewis were already far from it by this point, but that is the magic of movies, and makes sense this one can fake even the pleasures of spontaneity). Tashlin does two other things that set this apart: he has a better handle on the Martin only scenes snd more important he has much better integrated actresses around the duo helped by Hal Wallis gifting him with McLaine/Malone by far the best co-stars they ever got (McLaine in particular is wonderful and has chemistry with Jerry he never would have again). As this moves towards fantasy and the overactive images it gets better and better, even when it risks getting overstuffed, an overactive movie about an overactive mind.