The Fickle Finger Of Fame
No one better represents the pro actor's contempt for fame than Jerry Lewis. Praised by French critics as an auteur but viewed with suspicion here as a rubber-faced void, Lewis is the essence of star angst, says Jonathan Romney.
It's hard to avoid the suspicion that The King of Comedy (1982) was a veiled cry for help, or at least for sympathy, on the part of its co-star Jerry Lewis. Certainly there's little doubt that Lewis conspired with Martin Scorsese's direction and Paul D. Zimmerman's script to create a self-portrait of the showbiz pro as a lonely, embittered dinosaur. As chat-show host Jerry Langford, Lewis plays a man whose career is built on laughter, but who conspicuously laughs no more. Indeed, Lewis/Langford's jowly features seem weighed down, de-elasticated by too many years of forced hilarity. A man who has toiled in the showbiz mill and emerged bereft of illusions, Langford is stalked by Robert De Niro's inept star-struck tyro Rupert Pupkin, a man whose life is all illusion.
Curtly rebuffed when he arrives uninvited at Langford's mansion, Pupkin chides his hero: "That's how are you, when you reach the top." "No," retorts Langford, "I was that way before." It's a poignant line, especially if we read Langford as a version of the man who plays him: we can well believe that Jerry Lewis was indeed "that way before". It's no stretch of the imagination to think that Lewis might already have had something of Langford's steely, unforgiving nature, even before the galling mid-1960s decline of his screen career, even before his self-reinvention as the sentimentally authoritarian host of his widely reviled Muscular Dystrophy telethon. And no doubt a touch of Langford was already evident in the days of his notoriously rivalrous 1940s-50s partnership with Dean Martin.
The geeky, nebbish persona that made Lewis famous from the late 1940s on - half overgrown infant, half gibbon - belied a remarkable will-to-executive-power that drove him first to produce, then to write and direct his own films, to become (as he self-aggrandisingly named his 1971 book of professional musings) The Total Film-Maker. It's clear from a short documentary included on the recent DVD rerelease of Lewis' The Nutty Professor (1963) that he never suffered fools gladly: we hear him complain that there's nothing he hates on set so much as an incompetent, because that person took a competent's job. It's a striking remark, not least because of its tone of unforgiving intolerance, and that oddly personalised desire to scapegoat a weak link in the film-making process. And of course Lewis built his career on embodying, indeed glorifying, the archetype of the misunderstood, unfairly scapegoated incompetent, the child never allowed to burgeon properly into a competent adult.
Was Godard wrong?
Lewis addressed this theme with obsessive insistence, as can be seen in Paramount's recent DVD rereleases of his five first self-directed features from 1960 to 1964 (The Bellboy, The Ladies' Man, The Errand Boy, The Nutty Professor and The Patsy), together with the 1960 Frank Tashlin-directed Cinderfella. These films confirm that there is an auteur coherence to Lewis - that there is, as the revered critic Serge Daney once put it, a "monde lewisien".
France's high-brow Jerryphilia has long been a standing joke in Anglo-American film circles, and my purpose here isn't to argue that the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Robert Benayoun et al were right. In fact, these six films reveal that Lewis' humour is hit-and-miss and hasn't entirely dated well; that even at their most inspired, his gags are often brilliant as opposed to funny; and that he can be extremely - to use a very early-1960s word - corny, not to say sentimental. Yet this cycle of films remains audacious, bizarre, perverse and richly imagined: the product not merely of a strong auteur sensibility, but of one that is agonisingly equivocal about fame and success, and obsessed with problems of mastery, of control and self-control. (It's worth remembering that Lewis incorporated the split-identity theme into his working practice by directing himself with the aid of the now-standard, then-innovatory technique of video assist.)
It has become customary to read Lewis backwards from The King of Comedy, to take Jerry Langford as the most reliable vantage point for gazing back at the old Jerry Lewis. But there's another glimpse of latter-day Lewis, no less revelatory, in Peter Chelsom's under-rated piece of English seaside surrealism Funny Bones (1995). Lewis plays George Fawkes, a revered US comic whose son Tommy struggles to follow in Dad's footsteps. Tanking onstage in Vegas after being upstaged by his father, Tommy the 'incompetent' returns to his birthplace - Blackpool! - where he meets his half-brother, a disturbed man-boy who embodies George's idea of the innately brilliant comedian, the "funny bones" type. As George explains: "There are two types of comedians - the funny-bones comedian and the non-funny-bones comedian. They're both funny. One is funny. The other tells funny." It is finally revealed that the slapstick routine that first brought George success was stolen from two forgotten Blackpool end-of-the-pier comics.
That Lewis agreed to play a comic plagiarist was arguably no less risky a gesture than playing the rebarbative Langford; Lewis himself, of course, never made a secret of his debt to the likes of Chaplin, Keaton and especially Stan Laurel. Funny Bones represents a fascinating footnote to the Lewis oeuvre, raising as it does several questions of comic theory. What's really funny - the comic or the material? And must comics be born funny, or can they acquire comic 'competence'? To put it another way, what torments of discipline or self-abnegation must be undergone to transform the incompetent into the competent? Can funny bones be acquired at the cost of a bitter exercise of will?
Any schmuck will do
All the rereleased Lewis films explore the theme of the beleaguered inner self revealing itself under extreme conditions. In The Bellboy (1960) Lewis' character Stanley never utters a word until the very end, when challenged. When his amazed boss asks why he never opened his mouth before, Stanley calmly replies, "Because you never asked me." An anarchic comic natural, Stanley the bellboy periodically erupts into sudden anti-realist explosions of taut rhythmic brilliance: in a moment of fantasy he mimes a dictatorially prissy conductor, waving his baton over an invisible orchestra.
Other explosions of the inner self emerge 'unnaturally', through weird science or magic. In The Nutty Professor the time-honoured gurgling test-tubes allow gawky boffin Julius Kelp to unleash his hipster id Buddy Love; in Cinderfella the abject Fella, magically transformed, makes a bravura entrance at the ball, descending a grand staircase to Count Basie accompaniment. This routine, with Lewis exaggeratedly strutting in mock-military fashion to the band's brassy fanfares, strangely resembles a 1950s stripper's act - reinforcing the film's theme of sexual reversal, but also implying that Fella's shell has been peeled away to reveal the true inner being. And anyone tempted to produce a 'queer' reading of the Lewis oeuvre might well start with Cinderfella's earlier musical soliloquy: Lewis, in a harsh but accurate pastiche of Sinatra's tones, is heard in voiceover singing a morose underdog lament, as he mopes with James Dean-ish petulance. At last he opens his mouth to proclaim, "Look out! This Fella is finally coming out!" - at which point he's interrupted by his Fairy Godfather (Ed Wynn) in godmother drag.
Other films stage a last-act 'revelation' of talent, an against-all-odds reversal. Both The Errand Boy (1961) and The Patsy (1964) involve characters chosen to be manipulated precisely because they are incompetents, but who brazenly confound their exploiters at the last minute. In The Errand Boy Lewis is Morty Tashman, a gauche billposter at Paramutual Studios first seen sticking up an advertisement for Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy. In a ludicrously paradoxical premise, Tashman is chosen to act as informant for a survey of studio efficiency because he's the only person stupid enough for the job. It's purely by accident that Morty reveals his comic genius, when filmed holding an endlessly gushing magnum of champagne, leading a studio hireling - "a little New York Method director" - to harangue Old Man Paramutual about the ineffable talent Tashman/Lewis represents. Tashman is finally seen riding triumphant through the Paramutual lot before greeting the goofy kid who is posting the sign for Tashman's own movie: the kid is played by Jerry Lewis, and so the baton of success passes on. That fame's selection is entirely arbitrary - in stark contradiction to everything the earnest Method director has said - is underlined by the title of Morty's film: It Could Happen to You. Opportunity, under the right circumstances, can knock for any shmuck, any Tashman or Pupkin, who happens along.
Self-reflexive in the extreme, Lewis' early-1960s comedies chip away at the veneer of movie-making glamour. The mock-documentary preface of TheErrand Boy promises to expose the real Hollywood, and does so in a series of laborious skits about the truth behind movie illusion (a slapped gangster's moll is really plug-ugly Mike Mazurki in a wig; a romantic couple are bickering spouses). The Patsy dismantles stardom and the illusion of talent, showing the incompetence behind the competence. A group of Hollywood string-pullers decide to manufacture a biddable star and once again choose a transcendent dolt. In a process that reminds us that the Pop Idol syndrome is nothing new, another bellboy called Stanley is tailored and groomed, sent to a voice coach - whose home he wrecks in a sequence of uncontained hysteria - and finally promoted as a pop singer. Carefully placed rumour makes him the hottest name in town, a cheque that cannot possibly be cashed.
Stanley's puppetmasters abandon him to calamity when he debuts on The Ed Sullivan Show, only to find that Stanley has mounted a seemingly unprepared sketch: a gauche autograph hunter, yearning to get into a big movie premiere, slaps black paint on his windcheater and slacks then strolls triumphantly up the red carpet in real top hat and tails. Thus Stanley defeats all reasonable expectation: the dork proves to be a debonair natural. The routine is glib and not very funny but is notable as a variation on the trope of the impromptu triumph that caps many a backstage musical. At last, following Stanley's apotheosis, the final vestiges of illusion are dismantled: Jerry Lewis the director reveals that everything is happening on a studio set and sends his crew off for lunch.
Revenge on Dean Martin
If The Nutty Professor is the Lewis film that has laid claim to most critical respectability, it is partly for the atypical coherence of its narrative, partly for what it seems to present as the 'real' Jerry Lewis persona, apparently revealing the beloved geek's inner being as a confident and accomplished but harsh and cynical brute. Lewis' Dr Jekyll is Julius Kelp, a tongue-tied, unkempt chemistry professor, routinely humiliated by his hulking jock students and in love with their glamorous classmate Stella (Stella Stevens). As in The Patsy, the character's travails allow Lewis to visit some spectacularly vicious humiliations on his geek persona, as if that self had to be mortified - or Morty-fied - before he can be raised to a higher value.
A secret potion transforms Kelp first into an archetypal B-movie monster - a hairy hulk with red and blue mandrill features - then into a wisecracking, swaggering, implicitly violent hipster who dubs himself Buddy Love. Buddy's first appearance is heralded by an audacious point-of-view shot that echoes the Marvel Comics monster-horror titles of the early 1960s: an extended, stylised tableau vivant in which bystanders gawp, frozen with apparent horror at Kelp's as-yet-unseen new incarnation.
With his sexual hyper-confidence and slicked hair - more Brylcreemed even than nerdy Jerry's usual crew-cut - singing, smooching Buddy has routinely been seen as Lewis' revenge on Dean Martin, not merely parodying him but monstrously ingesting him (Lewis has frequently denied any such intent, though let's have a dash of salt with that Brylcreem). But Buddy Love could also be considered one part Tony Curtis and several parts Lewis' own confident self of the period, both as live cabaret performer and as director. Since 1983, of course, it has also been possible to read Buddy Love as an early version of the loveless authoritarian that Lewis would later implicitly admit to being: The King of Comedy's Jerry Langford.
Sexual terror
The Nutty Professor is the most coherent and self-enclosed of Lewis' solo cycle: he even plays Kelp as a consistent character rather than shifting personas as gags demand. The other films, conversely, remain startling in their refusal of coherence, indeed of logic. The most bizarre in this respect is The Ladies' Man (1961), in which hero Herbert Heebert - a jilted small-town boy - is prey not only to extreme sexual terror but to a concomitant, perversely reassuring infantilisation. Despite being sexually rejected, he is convinced all attractive women are out to jump his bones - and ludicrously winds up as a houseboy in a lodging house for young women.
But the film's misogyny defuses itself through hysterical excess: while The Ladies' Man attempts to contain the female threat by reducing women to dolls, it is Herbert who becomes the most doll-like, not to say automaton-like, figure of all. The film remains startling for its colossal four-level set, representing Helen Ann Welenmelon's mansion as a doll's house with the front removed, a self-enclosed toy world, at once austere and pinkly chi-chi, with an implicit touch of the bordello. It is down this bizarre construction's stairs that the women troop like mannequins early in the film, in a military-parade routine, and it is up them that Herbert races in the most surreal gag: retreating with terror from the women, he's literally beside himself, divided into four manically scuttling homunculi.
Lewis explores a similarly self-enclosed world in his first self-directed feature The Bellboy, which he shot on location in Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel in 26 days, immediately after playing a season there. Despite the enclosure, however, there's rather more air in The Bellboy, largely because of its black-and-white pseudo-documentary execution: the film claims to expose the behind-the scenes reality of resort life and does indeed have a vivid newsreel aspect to its observation of the American way of leisure in 1960, and of a generalised avidity, whether for food, entertainment, sun or sex. The most satirically acute of Lewis' films, The Bellboy is also the most free-form: a series of loosely connected riffs, a film without a plot.
What makes The Bellboy coherent is its fascination with its locale - both in itself (starkly and imposingly shot by Haskell Boggs) and in its potential as a stage for Lewis' antics. In its use of space and sound The Bellboy is the nearest Lewis comes to the spirit of Jacques Tati: visually, it's as spare as Playtime (though Tati would never have underlined his gags with Lewis' crass musical punchlines). There is a stern, elegant geometry to the routines involving the militarily drilled bellboys, lined up in hard diagonals in the hotel's cavernous lobby, uncontrollably falling out of line to scatter in different directions (in the most balletic gag Stanley and a colleague bob crazily in and out of formation, unsure which one has been summoned to the desk). In the film's pièce de résistance of comic economy Stanley is sent to fill a ballroom with chairs for a movie projection. He staggers across the vast empty space, then struggles, dithering, to put a single seat in place; the payoff is that, barely a minute later, hundreds of chairs are aligned in perfect rows.
Funny face
One of the pleasures of The Bellboy is that its non-sequitur structure allows Lewis to be totally cavalier with the Stanley character, making him whatever each scene requires. Sometimes Stanley is manic, sometimes sweetly passive; sometimes he's the source of all anarchy, sometimes the helpless observer of a mad world. The film displays a breathtaking gratuitousness, and in this light, anyone averse to Lewis' mugging - the aspect of his playing that has been most reviled over the years - should consider again the simple scene in which he gives his face a callisthenic workout, quite openly for the hell of it. Stanley tries to call a lift which doesn't come; alternately pressing the button and looking round in appeal at his bell captain, he turns, does a bewildered face, turns, does another face, and so on, in a brazenly unmotivated slideshow display of his repertoire. None of the expressions is remotely appropriate to the situation, yet all serve to measure out time until the lift arrives, which it does with predictable abruptness, Stanley plunging through its open doors. The routine is dazzling because it's so purely and explicitly a shtick - Lewis setting out to show that he can entertain us with nothing more sophisticated or grown-up than funny faces: comedia povera, if you like.
The film's most audaciously self-referential touch offers another early premonition of Jerry Langford - a hint of the later bitterness, of the director's own contempt for success and for everyone's idea of 'Jerry Lewis'. A celebrity guest is expected at the Fontainebleau, none other than Jerry Lewis, and a middle-aged manager blushes at his own excitement: "Oh, Mother used to take me to see him when I was just a kid" (a sly dig at Lewis' perceived suitability for juvenile audiences only). A limo draws up and a line of 27 movie-biz yes-men and -women, all wearing dark glasses, emerge - followed by the 'real' Jerry Lewis in a fedora and shiny black suit, monogrammed 'JL'. The star's fawning retinue laugh at his every remark and crush him with attentions, ruffling his suave veneer into a petulant, self-pitying mess ("I'm a nervous wreck, a nervous wreck!"). Then, in a brilliant single-take sight gag, Jerry Lewis enters a lift, followed by all 27 employees; at the tail-end comes the hapless bellboy Stanley, weighed down with the star's luggage.
Shortly after, the hotel's bell captain asks whether anyone has seen Stanley. "Which Stanley? The only Stanley in the world." At which point another Stanley entirely walks past - the other only Stanley in the world, Stan Laurel. It's not the real Stan Laurel, of course - whom Lewis tried to enlist as advisor on the film - but Lewis' co-writer Bill Richmond impersonating the great comic's befuddled hesitancy, and no more than adequately at that. It may be a heartfelt homage, but it's an awkward, slightly embarrassing one: Lewis is surely presuming too much a few moments later when he has Laurel and Stanley the bellboy exchange puzzled glances, as if to lay claim to his idol's blessing. But the moment also has a strange undermining effect - Stanley the bellboy isn't the only Stanley in the world, but then neither is this patently ersatz Stan Laurel. It suggests that, whatever New York Method directors say, screen talent may be ineffable but it's not inimitable. If a Jerry Lewis (or his co-writer) can aspire to being Stan Laurel, or a Rupert Pupkin to being Jerry Langford, then anyone, whether they have funny bones or not, can aspire to being - to replacing - Jerry Lewis. In these early 1960s films of his, fame, talent, even identity are presented as precarious commodities indeed; few stars have dramatised their own success, their own ability to carry off their shtick in front of an appreciative public, with such a sense of anxiety and self-distrust.
The punchline to this sour shaggy-dog story is that Jerry Langford isn't ineffably the 'true' Jerry Lewis either: the part in The King of Comedy was originally offered to chat-show host Johnny Carson.
The Jerry Lewis DVD box-set is available from Paramount Home Entertainment