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Contemporary Film Directors
Jerry Lewis
Well known for his slapstick comedic style, Jerry Lewis has also delighted worldwide movie audiences with a directing career spanning five decades. One of American cinema's great innovators, Lewis made unmistakably personal films that often focused on an ideal masculine image and an anarchic, manic acting out of the inability to assume this image. Films such as The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, Three on a Couch, and The Big Mouth present a series of thematic variations on this tension, in which such questions as how to be a man, how to be popular, and how to maintain relationships are posed within frameworks that set up a liberating and exhilarating confusion of roles and norms. The Nutty Professor and The Patsy are especially profound and painful examinations of the difficulty experienced by Lewis's character in reconciling loving himself and being loved by others. With sharp, concise observations, Chris Fujiwara examines this visionary director of self-referential comedic masterpieces. The book also includes an enlightening interview with Lewis that offers unique commentary on the creation and study of comedy.
- GenresFilm
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 4, 2024
It’s a cliche: “What do the French know— they love Jerry Lewis!” Well, of course, they’re right to. They see Jerry for what he is—an unself-conscious outpouring of American vulgarity and madness. What the frogs don’t get, alas—it just doesn’t translate, or they don’t pay much attention to American real life—is that Jerry’s movies have played in America for generations not as mainstream knee-slappers but as weird eruptions of comic aggression flavored like Percoset, misogyny, a generalized kind of mafioso hostility. Therein lies its sublimity.
The first half of this book by the marvelous cinematic close reader Chris Fujiwara takes a Deleuzean take. Rather than practice conventional criticism, Fujiwara breaks Jerry’s cinema, with its wild theatricality and self-consciousness, its routines within routines as if in a vaudeville or burlesque performance, Fujiwara speaks, for example, of “blocks”—a term the Total Filmmaker himself coined that, I think, is similar to a stand-up’s “twenty-minute hunk.” Jerry doesn’t see sequences per se so much as bits; or maybe a movie set piece in his mind is just a necessary good frame over a Jerry Block. Fujiwara dilates on props, plot devices, doppelgängers, freakish similarities in a delectable way—but to read this properly you have to have ALL of Jerry’s movies close to hand, or to mind. Which I intend to.
The second half is an interview with Jerry, relatively late in his life (mid-George W administration). The feeling of a ripe mix of senility, deathless anger, and a pharmaceutically induced swirliness is strong. Jerry attributes a quote he once attributed to Stanley Kubrick to some beatnik jazz guy. He beats up Norman Taurog and elevates George Marshall like he was one Leonardo DaVinci. What you get is that the little monkey doing pratfalls with Dino wanted to be a technically astute grownup who would gain the respect of the old crew guys—he breaks shots up into little catchphrases that Busby Berkeley would’ve been embarrassed by. It’s not Dino that Jerry wanted to be but Old Blue Eyes—yeah, respected and feared, especially the latter.
But all this is so much biographical frib-frab. Watch the movies. To cite the French title of Jerreleh’s late triumph HARDLY WORKING: t’es fou, Jerry!
The first half of this book by the marvelous cinematic close reader Chris Fujiwara takes a Deleuzean take. Rather than practice conventional criticism, Fujiwara breaks Jerry’s cinema, with its wild theatricality and self-consciousness, its routines within routines as if in a vaudeville or burlesque performance, Fujiwara speaks, for example, of “blocks”—a term the Total Filmmaker himself coined that, I think, is similar to a stand-up’s “twenty-minute hunk.” Jerry doesn’t see sequences per se so much as bits; or maybe a movie set piece in his mind is just a necessary good frame over a Jerry Block. Fujiwara dilates on props, plot devices, doppelgängers, freakish similarities in a delectable way—but to read this properly you have to have ALL of Jerry’s movies close to hand, or to mind. Which I intend to.
The second half is an interview with Jerry, relatively late in his life (mid-George W administration). The feeling of a ripe mix of senility, deathless anger, and a pharmaceutically induced swirliness is strong. Jerry attributes a quote he once attributed to Stanley Kubrick to some beatnik jazz guy. He beats up Norman Taurog and elevates George Marshall like he was one Leonardo DaVinci. What you get is that the little monkey doing pratfalls with Dino wanted to be a technically astute grownup who would gain the respect of the old crew guys—he breaks shots up into little catchphrases that Busby Berkeley would’ve been embarrassed by. It’s not Dino that Jerry wanted to be but Old Blue Eyes—yeah, respected and feared, especially the latter.
But all this is so much biographical frib-frab. Watch the movies. To cite the French title of Jerreleh’s late triumph HARDLY WORKING: t’es fou, Jerry!
July 15, 2020
I enjoy academic film books. But there's a line where theory gets too obscure and obtuse and this one crosses that line frequently. Or maybe I'm just not a big enough Lewis acolyte to buy into most of it.
December 12, 2009
I first saw some some Jerry Lewis films on TCM a little over a year ago and quickly became obsessed. Normally it's the type of schtick that would drive me mad (see: Robin Williams), but there's something really off (absurd, subversive) about them. His innocent characters come off as sincere instead of sentimental, and his pathological need to be loved somehow doesn't come off as needy.
This book consists of a ~100 page essay on JL's work as a director plus a long interview with him from 2003. Very insightful stuff -- here's a sample:
Like all narratives, the Lewisian narrative, however thwarted or vestigial it may be, poses and answers a question. But in Lewis's work, the question becomes forgotten or displaced. In The Ladies Man, the master question -- Can Herbert get over his problem with women? -- is simply dismissed, as Herbert finds himself in a house surrounded by women who overcome his reluctance and persuade him to stay. From this point on -- despite token references to the initial psychological configuration, as Herbert attempts periodically to leave the house -- the film is free to be about something else, or a succession of something elses. The Ladies Man becomes an elaborate, astonishing mise-en-scene of encounters, frightening, harassing, or pleasant, with the women of the house, as Herbert tries out a variety of roles.... The playing of these multiple roles appears to be an exercise that Lewis/Herbert indulges in for its own sake -- that is, simply as play rather than as some program of self-healing in an effort to resolve the initial problem.
This book consists of a ~100 page essay on JL's work as a director plus a long interview with him from 2003. Very insightful stuff -- here's a sample:
Like all narratives, the Lewisian narrative, however thwarted or vestigial it may be, poses and answers a question. But in Lewis's work, the question becomes forgotten or displaced. In The Ladies Man, the master question -- Can Herbert get over his problem with women? -- is simply dismissed, as Herbert finds himself in a house surrounded by women who overcome his reluctance and persuade him to stay. From this point on -- despite token references to the initial psychological configuration, as Herbert attempts periodically to leave the house -- the film is free to be about something else, or a succession of something elses. The Ladies Man becomes an elaborate, astonishing mise-en-scene of encounters, frightening, harassing, or pleasant, with the women of the house, as Herbert tries out a variety of roles.... The playing of these multiple roles appears to be an exercise that Lewis/Herbert indulges in for its own sake -- that is, simply as play rather than as some program of self-healing in an effort to resolve the initial problem.
April 25, 2016
I think Jerry Lewis is an important comedian and filmmaker so it was interesting to read this serious aesthetic/thematic analysis of his work (and by an American critic not a French one). Academic in style so not for everyone but, fans of Lewis, and readers who enjoy in-depth film criticism, will get a lot out of this short book.
It also includes an excellent interview with Lewis himself.
It also includes an excellent interview with Lewis himself.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews