The Jerry Lewis DVD Collection

I wouldn't consider myself well-versed on the films of Jerry Lewis, but what I have seen has been incredible. The influence on Godard's late-60's/early 70's work, both in the slapstick humor & bright, saturated colors, is very evident.

Jay, I don't think Mr. Lewis wants any of us to see The Day the Clown Cried. He bragged about it in the 70s as if it was the culmination of his artistry but he's back tracked on that severely. He reportedly flew into a rage the last time someone asked him about it. Copies of the screenplay are available all over the web if your curious.

Slant on Lewis:

http://slantmagazine.com/film/features/jerrylewis.asp

I intend to add short write-ups on both Hardly Working and Cracking Up sometime in the near future, but I have to write about horror movies first.

Hoo, that Steve Lawrence-as-Ed McMahon stuff on The Ladies Man commentary -- "Oh Steve, yer gonna love this..."

And if they are, which would ones should I try out first?

And if they are, which ones should I try out first?

Although it has 2 or 3 splendid sequences, don't buy Cinderfella.

Oh yes. That long sequence where Lewis and Leigh are slow-dancing might be among the very best things Lewis has directed. Shot completely over Lewis' shoulder, with Leigh's increasing expression of rapture, with the zinger that Lewis was asleep the entire time. Good stuff.

Dean & Jerry movies Vol. 1 out, but I'd wait for 2.

safe from ILE trolls here.

New DVDs: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

By DAVE KEHR
NY Times

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Collection
Volume 2

More than half a century has not proved sufficient to solve the mystery of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, nor to diminish their appeal. The mismatched pair — the smooth crooner and the squeaky kid — burst out of the smoky nightclub scene of the late 1940s and almost instantly became the dominant entertainers of postwar America. Martin and Lewis conquered movies, radio, the record industry and, not least, the emerging medium of television, the growth of which roughly paralleled their success.

Paramount Home Video has now released the second and presumably final volume of its “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Collection,” which consists of five films from the last years of their partnership: “Living It Up” (directed by Norman Taurog, 1954); “You’re Never Too Young” (Mr. Taurog, 1955); “Pardners” (Mr. Taurog, 1956); and the two films that Martin and Lewis made under the direction of Frank Tashlin, perhaps the most creative comic stylist of the 1950s, “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Hollywood or Bust” (1956).

(Missing in action are the team’s 3-D movie, George Marshall’s 1954 “Money From Home,” and Joseph Pevney’s 1954 “3 Ring Circus,” the first of their films in Paramount’s “Motion Picture Hi-Fidelity” process, VistaVision.)

It’s a remarkable collection, not least because Paramount has gone the extra mile and remastered “Artists and Models” and “Pardners” from original eight-perforation VistaVision elements, just as Paramount did with its magnificent reissue of Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” a few weeks ago. The images are crystal clear, and the vivid Technicolor almost erupts from the screen. By contrast, the transfer of “Hollywood or Bust,” made from normal 35-millimeter elements only three years ago, looks soft and dusty, though still quite watchable.

The technical stats are important, because they reflect a time when the Hollywood studio predigital technology had achieved its highest level. Prodded by competition from television, the studios joined the great American parade of bigger, better and best, turning out widescreen color films with stereophonic sound that made the fuzzy black-and-white of television look like a Model T parked next to the gleaming, tomato-red Chrysler convertible that co-stars with Martin and Lewis in “Hollywood or Bust.”

The huge interior sets constructed for a film like “Living It Up” — a reworking of the 1953 Broadway musical “Hazel Flagg,” itself based on the 1937 screwball comedy “Nothing Sacred” — gave Hollywood filmmakers an unusual degree of control over color, lighting and the partitioning of space. Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography, Edith Head’s costumes and the art direction credited to Albert Nozaki and Hal Pereira all come together in the service of highlighting the blue of Janet Leigh’s eyes — a shade echoed or complemented by every space she crosses, every dress she wears.

Paradoxically, it was the greater volume of visual information with the high-definition formats — VistaVision, CinemaScope, Todd AO — that eventually forced filmmakers out of the studios and into real-world locations. If location photography meant better-looking backgrounds than the painted flats or rear-projection screens of the studios, it also meant that filmmakers had to curtail their creative urges in the face of unmalleable reality. The next generation of directors — many of whom came out of television, like John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn — quickly learned to capitulate, embracing the new realism that emerged in the ’60s and ’70s.

No such barriers faced Frank Tashlin, a former newspaper cartoonist who received his directorial training at the Warner Brothers animation studio. A filmmaker accustomed to directing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig was, of course, right at home with Martin and Lewis, who brought their own cartoon universe with them. Tashlin was happy to provide them with an appropriately stylized world.

The central section of “Hollywood or Bust” finds Martin and Lewis driving that red convertible, the approximate size of a Swift boat, from New York to California, passing through an imaginary Midwest in which the skies are always blue, the road (before superhighways) is empty and inviting, and the haystacks and swimming ponds are overflowing with full-bodied calendar girls, sporting strategically abbreviated overalls. Here in seductive detail is America the Beautiful, the fantasy of ease and plenty and unbridled pleasure that the bounteous ’50s made almost possible to believe.

Tashlin was the most generous of satirists, a man who loved what he lampooned. The America he depicted was gaudy and vulgar, but undeniably fun. As a cartoonist, he was closer to Mr. Lewis’s comic persona (“Artists and Models” has a startling sequence in which a masseuse ties Mr. Lewis’s legs in pretzels, just as if he were an animated figure), and he continued to work with Mr. Lewis after the partnership with Martin dissolved. But Martin is more than a straight man in Tashlin’s films; he’s part of a dialogue between two ideas of the American male.

The contrast between Martin and Lewis is usually described in sexual terms: the sleek womanizer versus the gawky adolescent — the original 25- (if not 40-) year-old virgin. But to borrow some terminology from Claude Levi-Strauss (one of the few French intellectuals, it seems, not known to have written about Mr. Lewis), their pairing reflects that cultural division Levi-Strauss hypothesized between the “raw” and the “cooked,” with Mr. Lewis representing natural man with all his animal instincts and complete lack of self-consciousness, and Martin representing the end product of civilization and socialization, polished and upholstered, distant and cool, self-possessed and vaguely duplicitous.

If Martin was what America wanted to be — the young country suddenly pushed to the world stage, matching the Europeans and the Soviets with a manner and cunning of its own, a John F. Kennedy before the fact — then Mr. Lewis was what ’50s America was afraid it was, still a klutzy naïf, an overgrown child playing with dangerous toys. (The threat of nuclear war surfaces both in “Living It Up” and “Artists and Models.”)

Martin and Lewis’s friendship never seems less than genuine in their films, even when, as in the case of “Hollywood or Bust,” their last movie together, they were barely speaking on the set. Perhaps it is that warmth, that sense of collaboration and complicity between two fundamentally different characters, that gives these comedies their enduring appeal. These opposites not only attract; they also triumph. (Paramount Home Video, $29.99, not rated.)

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-king-of-comedy-20081117

"Lewis's great originality as a filmmaker lies in his art of multiplying segmentation or segmenting multiplicity so as to produce a spiraling disorder that leads miraculously to a reassertion of order...His films take place in zones of indeterminacy and combinatorial freedom."

“I have a confession,” Lewis writes. “Crazy. I have perched in an editing room and licked emulsion.” He must translate this devotion into a comprehensive technical knowledge and be enough of an on-set diplomat to sway the work of a team toward his personal vision. “The goal,” he argues, “is to have a one-man project made with one hundred and two pairs of hands.” In order to achieve this, the filmmaker must embrace creative “mind fights” within himself since he “cannot lie to any of his separate parts.” Being “totally identified with his product,” he risks never being satisfied. “There’s no easy way to shake that schmuck you sleep with at night,” Lewis confesses. “I have to sleep with that miserable bastard all the time. Very painful, sometimes terrifying.”

But the intellectual core of The Total Film-Maker resides in its final thirty pages, in a section simply titled “Comedy.” Here, Lewis forges a philosophy of humor as a form of social redemption. “The premise of all comedy is the man in trouble, the little guy against the big guy,” he argues. “It is the tramp, the underdog, causing the rich guy, or big guy, to fall on his ass.” Therein lies an essential link between comedy and tragedy—the depiction of violence. “Road Runner is worse than Bonnie and Clyde,” Lewis observes, but yukking it up is an attempt to ward off danger: “A hollow laugh is the normal reaction to being backed into a corner by a guy with a shiv.” Play also enables the catharsis of regression. Noting that all actors, himself included, possess the mentality of “nine-year old children,” Lewis observes that “at that age, hurt is possible, but degradation is seldom possible.” For Lewis, comedy is nothing less than the “surviving fabric of life.”

http://www.artforum.com/film/id=21472

Some friends and I have an annual movie weekend where we each bring 3 movies, none of which we've seen (and are therefore relatively blameless if the movies are horrible). I'm waiting to hear whether or not the others have seen Martin/Lewis' "The Caddy".

http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/reviews/Digging-Down-Deep-Jerry-Lewis-in-Conversation-With-Peter-Bogdanovich

Bogdanovich made the fatal misstep of asking Lewis how Lewis and Dean Martin met. Lewis bluntly refused to answer his question, explaining that he was tired of being asked the same question and that anyone who asked that question "was a moron. Present company included." Exasperated, Bogdanovich, gasping for air, pleaded, "But you told me backstage that I could ask you anything." Lewis smugly responded, "It's true. But I lied."

Jerry looking better than he has in years, or the cameraman is unbelievably sympathetic

I was at Wal-mart the other day and I saw amongst the new release dvds an animated Nutty Professor sequel featuring Jerry as Kelp and Drake Bell as his grandson. And it was produced by the Weinsteins!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514%2BKuGfQBL._SS500_.jpg

Just added to me queue.

Let us celebrate the ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING autodidact-auteur-humanitarian with a new career overview from Bright Lights:

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/63/63jerrylewis.html

Feeling forbidden to play himself — condemned by a Hollywood (of which he is an integral part, we must remember) to play the fool or the slick comedian — Jerry Lewis structures his two key films, The Nutty Professor and The Patsy, around this personal dilemma.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that Lewis' films are particularly remarkable for their injection of masculine sentiment, emotional ambivalence, and sexual self-doubt into a decade when masculinity was defined by the completely vicarious machismo of James Bond's adventures. The unsteadiness of Lewis' image — his compulsion to present himself as both the world's greatest genius/lover/filmmaker and, at the same time, as merely an ordinary guy (or worse) — is an ambivalence that forges The Nutty Professor into a uniquely Lewisian structure: the myth of the ordinary man confronting the extraordinary specter of his own creativity and, implicitly, confronting the power of his Hollywood image to eat him alive....

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0215-jerrylewis-phillipsfeb15,0,4509696.story

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/movies/22darg.html

got the new Chris Fujiwara book on JL today!

a slew of new releases (tho one is just a straight acting job)

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/rock-a-bye-baby/2222

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/the-geisha-boy/2221

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/boeing-boeing/2219