Chris Fujiwara,
Jerry Lewis (Contemporary Film Directors).
University of Illinois Press, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0252076794
US$19.95 (pb)
176pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press)

This brief but pithy volume increases the count of English language books about the films of Jerry Lewis to One. Lewis’ own books The Total Filmmaker(1971), and his memoirs Jerry Lewis: In Person (1982) and Dean and Me (A Love Story) (2006) don’t really count being entirely subjective. And the less said about Shawn Levy’s The King of Comedy: The Art and Life of Jerry Lewis(1997) the better. There has been serious writing about Lewis in English sporadically. Jonathan Rosenbaum has been most assiduous in taking Lewis serious over the years. And Frank Tashlin, the BFI volume Roger Garcia edited in 1994 (which includes contributions from a number of writers including yours truly) grapples with Lewis’ achievements in his Tashlin collaborations repeatedly. But in examining “the continuity of Lewis’ work in all its stages” Fujiwara mines new ground.

Noting that “from the start, Lewis took an active part in shaping his films,” Fujiwara details how he aimed at becoming a director from the moment he arrived in Hollywood to appear with Dean Martin in My Friend Irma(USA 1949). Exploring every avenue of Paramount’s enormous studio, paying particular attention to film editing, Lewis won genuine on-the-job experience. He collaborated on the scripts of several of the Martin and Lewis films without credit, winning billing for “special material with song numbers” on Money From Home (USA 1953), and directed several scenes from Living It Up (USA 1954), particularly his famous dance with Sheree North. Consequently by the time it became possible for him to do a film of his own (The Bellboy in 1960) he was more than ready.

Fujiwara cites this film repeatedly, as well as such masterpieces as The Ladies Man (USA 1961), The Nutty Professor (USA 1963), and The Patsy (USA 1964). Lewis is nothing if not a director of enormous spaces and the forms that move through them. While he’s reflexively and logically compared to Chaplin and Keaton, Busby Berkeley is his true predecessor – particularly in the “waking up” sequence of The Ladies Man when the enormous doll’s house of a set comes to life as the women in it get up and do their daily routines to music. But the movement we see in this scene reveals only one part of the Lewis mise-en-scène.

“In Lewis’ films, the separate blocks of identity that constitute his characters are unified, if at all, only by Lewis himself: as a body, as a famous star, as a complex image,” (p. 20) Fujiwara notes, underscoring the disparity between the obvious mastery required to make comedies of this kind and the “innocent” character that Lewis plays that sits at its center. He makes particular note of the conversation Lewis’ “Morty” has with the Ostrich puppet “Magnolia” in The Errand Boy (USA 1961) who speaks in a Southern accent and is treated by both “Morty” and the film itself as if she were a real person.
The Errand Boy also includes the telling board-room scene where “Morty” alone in the office address the room as if he were the studio chief barking orders. The “barks” consist of his miming to music – which is how Jerry began in his pre-Dean days. But this scene is one of relative stasis, unlike most of Lewis.

“A typical trajectory in Lewis’s cinema is a running to and fro, a starting-off in one direction only to turn back confusedly, what Maurice Blanchot calls ‘a dis-cursus – a broken interrupted course that imposes the idea of the fragment as a form of coherence.’” (p. 15) Yes that’s a really heavyweight quote. But most a propos. And it is to be hoped that it, and everything else Fujiwara has to say about Lewis will be taken to heart by serious critics. We’ve long passed the stage where mention of Jerry Lewis becomes an occasion for dissing the French. His progeny are everywhere. Not only in the form of Eddie Murphy and his successful reconfiguration of The Nutty Professor, but in the careers of the relatively disparate likes of Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell. And then there’s Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (USA 1982) in which Jerry plays someone quite like his actual self being kidnapped by male (Robert DeNiro) and female (Sandra Bernhard) fans that are nightmare versions of his “innocent” persona. If Fujiwara’s book has one flaw it’s his disinclination to comment on the Scorsese. But that doesn’t take away from the larger achievement of accessing the exceedingly large achievements of Jerry Lewis.

David Ehrenstein,
USA.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010