Maybe we should create a Jerry Lewis thread. The Day the Clown Cried came up on Bedazzled.com recently. Is there something in the air? It’s basically a link to a link to the same site to which I posted a link days ago.
While I’m on the subject, here are my top ten favorite Jerry Lewis films (solo–as in without Dean).
1. The Bellboy
2. The Ladies Man
3. The Nutty Professor
4. The King of Comedy
4. Cinderfella
5. Cracking Up
6. The Errand Boy
7. Rock-A-Bye Baby
8. The Delicate Delinquent
9. Arizona Dream
10. Which Way to the Front?
ooh look, a jerry lewis thread!
john will be appalled to read that the only jerry lewis films i’ve seen are the king of comedy and arizona dream. this despite being your room-mate for three years, john. the fault, i think, is yours.
Jesus, that was fast.
One of my happiest moments in L.A. was seeing The Nutty Professor at the New Bev with Peter and Nikki. I think Frisoli was there, too. Nikki laughed her ass off more than once, if I recall. Her laughter was rivaled by another’s, if I also recall. Someone sitting in the row in front of us. Right when the film started, he unwrapped an enormous meatball sandwich and proceeded to eat through his laughter. Or laugh through his eating. And I mean laugh. And eat.
A lot of freaks in L.A., you know? I won tickets to a screening of Head at the Egyptian through KCRW. I took my then girlfriend with me. I had seen Head a number of times, but never on the big screen. And Micky Dolenz was there. He acted just like Jerry Lewis. I mean, imagine Martin Short parodying Jerry. Micky was doing the same bit, but for real. He went on for fifteen minutes about how Mike Myers stole his idea about a guy who is frozen in the 60s and then thawed in the 90s. “Problem was, the guy we pitched it to, he was head of the studio that week, and him with the Eva Braun girlfriend…” the whole bit. Anyway, finally the movie starts, and this guy sitting next to us, alone, starts talking out loud. And it was like a running commentary. For example, every time Mike Nesmith did something, this guy would chuckle to himself and say “Mike’s the cool one.” He was a 40-year old Beavis without a Butthead.
Arnab, weren’t you at the apartment when I had the Telethon party? It was fairly impromtu, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t. I think Frisoli was there. And maybe Peter? We got bored and watched a Beatles documentary instead.
But I have drifted. And I’m too sleepy to keep this up.
I have a very fond memories of watching Jerry Lewis films and Lewis and Martin films as child during the sixties, though I have rarely been inclined to return to them. I can remember staying up on Saturday nights watching the broadcast premiere of many of these films. I would, however, like to throw some love out to Funny Bones, which I really enjoyed.
The Nutty Professor was one of the names of the tables at our wedding reception. I love that movie.
i remember now, i was at the when harry met sally table. and i ended up with a diffident englishman in my room that night.
Has anyone seen Where the Truth Lies? It’s directed by Atom Egoyan, who also adapted the screenplay from a novel by Rupert Holmes. Alison Lohman plays a reporter who tries to uncover the truth behind the break up of one of America’s most popular comedy teams, Lanny Morris and Vince Collins (Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, respectively). Lanny is played by Kevin Bacon and Vince is played by Colin Firth.
I’m curious why Holmes would write such a novel in the first place. I understand it’s pretty seedy, and it seems to be the product of a culture that loves to sniff out moral corruption and will, Hank Quinlan style, gleefully plant evidence in order to make sordid an affair that is already assumed to be sordid anyway–that is, underneath the false surface, underneath all the glitz and romance. The evidence is there anyway, if you look hard enough, or wish hard enough.
This type of film takes us to a specific period (mid- to late-60s and early 70s), to a specific subculture (Hollywood, yes, but the Hollywood of nightclubs, drugs, sex, and perversion–Hollywood behind the cameras. But not the “backstage” Hollywood, the stuff you read about in Variety. More precisely, the Hollywood when the cameras stop rolling and something else happens, something that isn’t being filmed, can’t be filmed because it’s not meant for anyone to see–which is why we want to see it), and it evokes a particular style of entertainment, a class of audience, and a kind of Match Game aesthetic.
I’m thinking of Schrader’s Auto Focus and, perhaps less so, Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. But not James Cox’s Wonderland. The latter, which deals with the underground world of porn, doesn’t really qualify. What’s of interest here is a paradox: these people give us good, wholesome entertainment. But underneath, there’s something immoral, reckless, and threatening. Maybe because people like Jerry Lewis are potentially, dangerously anti-bourgeois. Jerry is reviled by many for what I think are bourgeois reasons: he does not qualify as conventional or respectable in any way. He is crass, loud, and grotesque (Francois Truffaut, in a shameful slip of French anti-Semitism, called Jerry’s nose “degenerateâ€).
With Dean in tow, he comes dangerously close to conventional and respectable, and it is Dean’s charm and charisma that helped pave for the way Jerry’s successful solo career. And although Jerry ultimately gave us an acceptable form of entertainment, he always remained inappropriate the same way the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the 70s is both respectable and inappropriate. There’s a wonderful bit from Saturday Night Live that captures this idea: I think Dana Carvey plays Johnny, Phil Hartman plays Burt Reynolds and Chris Farley plays Dom Deluise. They’re all incredibly drunk and Deluise is laughing so hard he pisses his pants. There are no words spoken in the skit—everything is grossly physical. It’s almost nightmarish. Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi comes to mind. I don’t know why I’m making these associations, but they seem right.
Anyway, my point is this: Jerry threatens bourgeois society’s most cherished classifications (high/low) and conjures up terrors that are extraterritorial to the bourgeois collective identity. But what is more disturbing is the nearness of Jerry. He circulates freely in respectable bourgeois culture (whereas John Holmes does not—which is why I disqualify something like Wonderland or Anderson’s Boogie Nights). Our culture demands that Jerry be put back where he belongs—I think this explains the ritualistic excoriation Jerry receives. Take, for instance, the way The Day the Clown Cried is talked about. Harry Shearer expresses our collective disgust, which takes the form of a pollution rite, when he says, “The closest thing I can come to describing the effect [of watching The Day the Clown Cried] is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You’d just think, ‘My God, wait a minute. It’s not funny. It’s not good, and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly held feeling.'”
Degenerate Art
I saw Where the Truth Lies and thought it was a mildly entertaining, sleazy yet compulsively watchable Hollywood noir. Egoyan is better than the film but I still couldn’t turn it off.
I guess I’m trying to understand why a film like this is made (or a novel like this is written). I’m less interested in whether or not it is entertaining.
Re the Truth Lies: I’m not sure what about the project motivated Holmes–‘though his prior works were slightly avant-garde spins on noir/melodrama conventions. I seem to recall from reviews that people liked a) the structural problems of the past as it informs/deforms memory and the present. And b) the collision of “low comedy” and “high emotion”. I’d bet it’s less the lurid attraction–exposing the true smut behind false propriety–than somewhat akin to your comments (very smart) on Jerry as the embodiment of inappropriate, and maybe back to Michael’s ideas about shtick: to read something more powerfully subversive within, around, through the seemingly bland pied face of slapstick and low gags.
But I think we so thoroughly discount/discredit comedy that maybe it’s more the powerfully subversive “applied to” the b. p. f. of s. and l. g. I.e., comedy doesn’t know enough, isn’t really in charge of its potential (if it even has any). I.e., only through the more complicated dynamics of noir or melodrama can the worthwhile be pulled out of comic hijinx.
That all said… whatever Holmes or Egoyan thought, there’s a cultural desire to see the shitstains behind the star. Donald Spoto and Kitty Kelley have made a living out of this; even Albert Goldman’s interesting bio of Lenny Bruce seemed more invested in “the sick” than the sick humor. Could it be that humor scares us so much that we would rather try to project away or disavow its challenges, to differentiate the “pure” and the deviant through a (false) binary of the clean onstage act and the sinful offstage antics? (And, it goes without saying, the high and low.) And–as you very effectively note–Jerry resists the division…
I admit to … well, lacking the love John has for Jerry. But the genius of King of Comedy seems to be based on the way Jerry underplays the role. By locking down, by being so staid and polished (and highbrow?) and scornful, Jerry’s aura of bodily breakdown, of giggles and yuks, of the tremendous disruption of the staid and polished ripples out and inflects everything (and everybody) else in the movie. We can’t watch Jerry without that whole representational history informing our viewing–so, for me, when Jerry is restrained, the rest of the movie seems to bubble up with the Lewis spirit. Pupkin becomes more extravagantly silly (and dangerous); DeNiro’s every move strikes me as one slip away from pratfall, his hunched body seems one spasm away from Wha-hooooyyyy. And Bernhard is channeling Jerry, when she climbs on “his” lap…
That’s great, Mike. Pupkin is perfect–especially since I was thinking as much about aesthetics as politics. Pupkin looks the part he plays. The cheap suits, cheesey mustache, impossibly black, shiny hair.
Also: it’s not just Jerry who is staid, polished, restrained. So is the network exec, played by Shelley Hack. Pupkin seems all the more lascivious and obscene in those encounters with her in the lobby. You can hardly detect any repulsion in Hack’s character, Cathy Long, but you know it’s there.
Happy Birthday, Jerry.
I’ve recently been watching some of the old Martin & Lewis TV shows. You can get several hours worth at Best Buy on 2 DVDs really cheap.
John, what do you think of those? (or anyone else too – but John being such a Jerry fan – I’m not sure how you feel about the duo stuff). I’m personally more of a Dean man myself. First for his music, second for the persona, third for the weird chemistry with Lewis and a distant fourth for his real acting. Fifth for telling Sinatra to go fuck himself.
But that show seems to reveal a lot about them: How hard they worked (Dean rattles off incredible schedules at one point of where they’re performing, including doing the monthly Colgate Hour and a charity telethon in New York (and that was besides the MDA thing, which they also talked about – in 1953)), How mean Jerry perceived Dean to be to him (even if he wasn’t), and then Jerry being VERY mean to people offstage (writers, directors, cameramen).
Finally the show displays how contrived all of the “spontaneous” Jerry stuff really was. While much of it was still quite funny, I never once believed what Jerry was doing wasn’t entirely calculated down to every weird noise and double-take.
It was Dean in those shows that seemed spontaneous, though it was so far keyed down from Jerry’s antics as to seem almost sleepy.
The shows are interesting – worth watching some of them at least. They’re no Jack Benny shows though. Damn, Benny’s show was funny.
I like the shows a lot, though I’ve only seen four of them straight through, and then a bunch a clips from the Jerry-authorized bio of Martin & Lewis that was on the Disney Channel many years ago.
Dean is pretty amazing. And I love the duo stuff, though my memory of the shows is that the sketches were fairly repetitive–pretty much the same bit over and over. Some really stand out though, such as the bit where Jerry plays Dean’s caddy and he recommends the niblick. Dean refuses, and Jerry just repeats it ad nauseum. “Niblick”!
And of course the “Don’t lick it” and “I like it, I like it” bits. This was more than two decades before “What you talkin’ bout Willis?” and “Eat my shorts.” Jerry likes to say he and Dean invented “the catch phrase.”
Overall, the shows are fun in a Carol Burnett & Friends kind of way.
I’m not sure what my favorite Martin & Lewis films are…The Stooge, The Caddy are classics, but I also like Living it Up and You’re Never Too Young–remakes of Nothing Sacred and The Major and the Minor, respectively.
Bet you didn’t know that Jack Abramoff tried to raise money for a remake of Jerry’s The Day the Clown Cried.
I first heard about this when I read the June issue Harper’s. In the “Readings” section, there’s a series of excerpts from letters written in support of Abramoff. He submitted them “as pleas for leniency before his sentencing for fraud related to his purchase of SunCruz Casinos.” But the letters were so odd (“He stumped my children with unusual vocabulary words” and “Prison was perhaps the most boring time of my life, but Jack worked hard at trying to get me various study books”) that when I came across the one that pointed to Abramoff’s interest in a remake of The Day the Clown Cried, it didn’t really stick. I guess it got lost in the absurd swirl.
But it’s true
Axtually, I did know the Lewis-Abramoff connection, but from the same issue of Harper’s that you mentioned.
Oddly, almost immediately after reading your comment, I found this: A blog entry that gives more details about Abramoff & the movies.
http://looker.typepad.com/looker/2006/06/the_clown_still.html
Same link, Mark.
Same link as what?
Anyway, here’s another link – this one to 10 films caught in limbo. Most of them are pretty well known, despite being rarely or never seen.
I didn’t know about Jodorowsky’s connection with John Lennon, and TCM did a pretty long cut of Greed lately. Not 9 hours of course, but longer than the normal one I think.
Nice little summary. Jerry’s there too of course.
http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2006/limbo/index.html
As John would say, “Same link, Mark.”
Ah, that list included a note about Series Noire–a film I’ve read about, always wanted to see…
hmmmph!
Following a news conference in Sydney Friday, Jerry Lewis, 82, was asked by a Network Ten national TV reporter for his opinion on the Australian nation sport of cricket.
”Oh, cricket? It’s a fag game. What are you, nuts?” Lewis replied.
Reached for comment, Arnab fumes.
that’s because jerry didn’t see the indians take the mighty australian team apart in the second test earlier this week.
what’s with Jerry and the “fags?” Didn’t he call someone an “illiterate fag” during his telethon? the steroids must be taking a toll on his brain, boosting up that old Vegas homophobia. but, of course, cricket is a fag game after all…so score one for jerry!
I think it has something to do with comedy and Bakhtin.
Christ! When I saw that the Jerry Lewis post had made it to the top of the “recent comments” list, I figured Jerry had died.
Why the fag thing? Jerry is both hopelessly of his time and shamelessly crass. Frisoli and I went to see him in Vegas at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in…2000, I think? And he made a Guns ‘n’ Roses joke. Then he made a joke that I remember from grade school: how do the Chinese name their kids? They drop a fork onto a plate and whatever sound it makes, that’s the kid’s name: ‘pang’ ‘gong’ ‘poing’ ‘dang” ‘plung.'”
He also did the same cane routine he’s done for 40 years.
yeah, but what a cane routine! and, hey lady, if I had nuts, I’d have dates! He made a “Guns ‘n’ Roses” joke–wow, that’s pretty hip for Jerry. I thought he made fun of the names of The Kinks and Stones (or was that Krusty?). after the show he called us fags and punched us in the stomach. Vegas!
John, I suspect you’ve heard about this.
I don’t get it..is he a singer or a clown in it? Please read the reviews on Amazon-there’s a nice exchange regarding Lewis’ ego! will “The Day the Clown Cried” be out next?
Jeff, thanks. I hadn’t heard about it. But I’ve asked our library to purchase a copy. When it arrives, I’ll watch and report back.
Michael, I don’t think we’ll ever see The Day the Clown Cried. Some may think that would be a good thing, but that misses the point about Jerry Lewis.