How did it all start for you with Martin and Lewis?
I’ve always been a big fan of the Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy (1982). It was always my favourite film and was one of the films that really set me on a path towards getting into film when I was younger. But I never really went any further with Jerry Lewis’s work until my friend Kat (Haylett), also my co-curator at Ecstatic Truths, told me I should watch Artists and Models (1955). I clearly forgot the specific recommendation, but the idea must have lodged itself in my brain somewhere because I went away and I watched The Ladies’ Man (1961).
I had this really strange reaction to The Ladies Man. There’s this attraction/repulsion dichotomy going on where I was kind of disturbed, but I couldn’t look away. I hadn’t expected that. I had thought it would be sort of a Playboy-esque 60s dirty comedy, like the James Bond parody films that Dean Martin made – the Matt Helm ones. But it wasn’t that at all, it’s a very strange film that operates almost on dream logic. I had never watched comedy that feels so… rootless in a sense. And it showcases the main thing I love about movies; the artificiality of them. There’s also a real formal playfulness to The Ladies Man that feels very experimental for a film from that time; I should say, for a commercial, big-budget Hollywood comedy.
But I’m whistling through this because my reaction was less to the film than it was to Jerry Lewis, who I found very difficult to understand. Very viscerally repulsive in the strange regressive sequences, but also psychologically fascinating that he’s situated within this weird unconscious surreal space. I mean, there’s that incredible scene with the Miss Cartilage dance that seems to come and go absolutely out of nowhere. I just couldn’t get a grasp on the film or Jerry as a performer. I’ve watched it five or six times and still react as strongly.
But from then on I was extremely struck by his work. The next day I watched The Bellboy (1960) in the morning and then I was messaging my partner, saying, “I need your Amazon login. I really want to watch The Nutty Professor!” I watched The Nutty Professor (1963) on the coach on my phone (which I never do!) and then I got home and watched Artists and Models (1955). I was on this crazed trajectory I’ve not been able to shake since.
Then in terms of Dean Martin, my family loves him and his music has always been a big part of my life. When I spoke to my nan as I was first getting into Martin and Lewis, she said that I used to always insist on singing Little Old Wine Drinker Me at family parties when I was five or so. So I’ve always been a Dean Martin fan, but I’d never really come across Martin and Lewis together.
In terms of Jerry Lewis’s comedy style, you mentioned the feel of being unmoored, untethered, and hard to pin down. Does that improvisational style of comedy make for a more personal connection to Lewis the performer?
From what I understand, he did improvise. He made his films largely in the editing room, so he filmed hundreds of hours of footage (which I want to see). And because the films were largely vignette-led, he would just choose which vignettes to set in dialogue with one other. And he continued to edit his films for his whole life because he was never satisfied with the final version of them. So I think somewhere, probably in the Library of Congress, there are various versions of his films.
In terms of being improvisational, he was definitely aspiring to be like Charlie Chaplin, who he saw as the ultimate ‘total filmmaker’. As I understand, Chaplin’s process was he would have a premise and then the story would all come out of how they spontaneously interacted on set. Jerry did a similar thing. So his dialogue, particularly, is quite improvisational. There are scripts, obviously, but he makes a lot of abrasive noises and speaks in these garbled non-sequiters that could only be produced off-the-cuff. I remember reading a funny anecdote about how he would need to offer a script for the censors of everything he’d said in the film, and would need to work out how to phonetically interpret the strange noises that he’d made.
I think it’s interesting because although he does disappear into this Jerry figure, no matter what he always has on these quite gaudy gold rings; this massive ring on his little finger as well as his wedding ring. I think that visual reminder kind of delineates Jerry the person from Jerry the persona. And I always find that split very interesting, especially if you’re looking at stuff like The Nutty Professor. That’s one of the films I think he completely sheds his usual persona, because neither Julius Kelp or Buddy Love is the Jerry Lewis “Kid” figure he usually performs. But then again, The Nutty Professor isn’t a typically vignette-led Jerry Lewis film – it’s a much more traditional narrative feature. But even when he’s playing this nerdy Professor character, he still has these massive gold rings on, just to remind you that beneath it all, that is still Jerry Lewis.
Getting into that divide a little more between Jerry the persona and Jerry Lewis the performer, how does that tension manifest within his films?
Well, thinking about him as a person, there’s an inherent tension there anyway. There’s a really good book on this, Frank Krutnik’s Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000). He talks a little bit about how Jerry was very difficult to love as a performer, even before accounting for his actual work, because he was an extremely contradictory person. He was very outwardly kind and emotionally vulnerable, but at the same time known to be mercurial and callous.
In terms of how that divide plays with his comic persona, I think he himself is very much aware of it and almost all of his films have this meta-aspect, including in The Caddy. Jerry Lewis, the man, often appears within Jerry Lewis’s films as a separate character set against Jerry Lewis, the comic persona. I’m thinking of The Bellboy, specifically. I mean, this is an interesting outlier anyway, because he’s largely silent in it. But his character, Stanley Belt, is a character who’s suffocated by his circumstances in that he’s never allowed to speak and there’s this classic Jerry-ism where he keeps going to speak but something always gets in his way. It happens several times; there’s always this rebuttal. This bit originated with Martin and Lewis, but he comes back to it throughout his career. So Stanley is not allowed to speak, but when the figure of Jerry Lewis appears in the film, he speaks, he does nothing but speak, and no one listens. So in that role, he contrasts the suffocating nature of being boxed into that comic persona, but equally how suffocating it is to be a celebrity and to be loved but not known. Which I find very interesting.
Let’s move on to Dean Martin. How will you prepare people who are familiar with Rat Pack Dino for what he’s like when he’s with Jerry?
I don’t think that Dean Martin is that different with the Rat Pack than he is with Jerry, to be honest. When he joined the Rat Pack, the Jerry role was sort of supplanted by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy Davis Jr. was a close friend of Jerry Lewis and was also directed to play a Jerry figure in One More Time (1970). He has a somewhat similar manic comic style. So the Rat Pack sort of functioned as a new Jerry to Dean’s work.
I think the difference with Dean Martin during the Martin and Lewis era is that from the end of the Martin and Lewis split, Dean Martin essentially plays a parody of himself. He’d established a persona while he was with Jerry, where he was a ladies man. He was handsome, charismatic, he was a crooner. He played gigolo-type roles as well. He was a very sexually appealing character. And then after the split, he starts to parody that established role. His comedy became very lowbrow, very lecherous, he became this drunk figure – he’s known for always pretending to be more drunk than he actually was. And that’s interesting because it contrasts to how he’d established himself as a very clean-cut leading man when he was set against Jerry; Jerry being the crazy uncontrollable half of the act.
So to prepare people for Dean Martin with Jerry, I think that they should just prepare to see Dean Martin much younger and Dean Martin as the authoritative figure to someone else’s mania. When he came off the back of Martin and Lewis, Dean was able to branch out and explore his vulnerability a lot more as well. He made Rio Bravo (1959) with Howard Hawks and in that he’s playing an emasculated figure against John Wayne, essentially the father figure. And that’s something that he hadn’t been able to do with Jerry where he was always boxed into the sort of the paternal role against Jerry’s ‘kid’.
Dean Martin is hard to get to the core of. He’s an incredibly amorphous figure, and there’s a great biography I’d recommend about this called Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Toshes. He is absolutely fascinating because he’s impossible to pin down. I don’t understand him. I can’t understand him. Jerry himself has said he didn’t fully understand him. No one understood him. So when I saw that you had written a question about Dean Martin for me, I was like, “sh*t!” I’m not qualified to explain the guy. No one knows him. He’s unknowable. There’s a whole book about it!
I love the idea that it took the whole rat pack to replace Jerry for Dean.
And Jerry seemed desperate to be part of the Rat Pack as well. I think that’s sort of what he’s satirising in The Nutty Professor although I don’t necessarily agree with this commonly touted idea that Buddy Love is a parody of Dean Martin. But Jerry’s conception of the worst guy in the world is a nightclub crooner; a very Las Vegas nightclub crooner. I think it’s self-parody, but it’s also clearly parodying the Rat Pack. There’s some bitterness there.
What is it that makes that dynamic so special, specifically in The Caddy?
In The Caddy, the dynamic is quite mean-spirited. It aligns closely with The Stooge (1952), I’d say. The release of The Stooge was delayed because Hal Wallis, the producer, was concerned that audiences would essentially riot when they saw how abused Jerry is in it. In The Caddy, Dean Martin is cruel to Jerry. Not tongue-in-cheek cruel, he’s just cruel. There’s this interplay where Dean Martin is like a wall and Jerry is a relentless force trying to love him and being met with indifference.
It’s a very strange relationship in The Caddy because Jerry plays Dean Martin’s brother-in-law, his sister’s fiancé, and Dean Martin treats him in a way that no fiancé should ever be treated. It’s interesting, too, because in The Caddy, Jerry is a lot more explicitly feminised. He often is; he often would play Dean Martin’s wife, essentially, in their Talk of the Town sketches and lots of their Colgate Comedy Hour stuff. But in this one, there’s this quite upsetting, melodramatic scene where Dean has won a golf tournament. He comes back to their motel and Jerry is there. He has that classic coding of an emasculated man in old Hollywood, which is that he’s wearing an apron. And he’s cooking dinner for them and doting on Dean and insisting that Dean stay home for dinner. Dean essentially rejects him and says “no, I’m going out with Donna Reed”. And then Jerry has this really – it’s not funny. I don’t know why I’m laughing – but this quiet, sad moment where he just sits down and watches the pot boil over. And it’s really sad.
But that’s because Jerry had such a hand in how their films were made. Like I said, he was obsessed with Chaplin, so he was always trying to inject his films with this sense of pathos, which is sometimes quite jarring. There’s a real sense of self-victimisation in The Caddy. Dean Martin was famously q
uite lax and spent most of his time on the golf course. Jerry sort of handled all of their affairs. The Caddy was produced by their independent production company, York Pictures, and while it was being written, Jerry would pop into the writer’s room every day and make changes to what had been written. So what you see in The Caddy sort of works as an image of how Jerry wanted their partnership portrayed.
In terms of general Martin and Lewis dynamic, it tends to be Jerry as this id-driven child/monkey fusion, and Dean as the container for that. Dean works to offset and control him and reassure audiences that nothing’s ever going to get too crazy. But it’s difficult because in the films, it’s a lot more formulaic. Their producer, Hal Wallis, did box them into specific roles. He said, “That’s the formula, don’t f*ck with it”. Dean would be the singer, the leading man, the romantic lead, and Jerry would be the crazy, kooky comic. And it means that it loses a lot of the fluidity of their live work where they were not so easily boxed in. Ostensibly, Dean was the straight man and Jerry was the comic, but they would switch back and forth between these nonstop. Less so in their films, unfortunately.
What is the most exciting prospect about seeing The Caddy with a crowd?
The most exciting prospect of it is the fact that Martin and Lewis films are so rarely screened and, maybe selfishly, I want to watch The Caddy on the big screen. As far as I’m aware, the film hasn’t screened in the UK since it came out – certainly not in my lifetime. I was really happy when I was at Il Cinema Ritrovato to be able to go and see the new 3D restoration of Money From Home (1953). It was incredible, and the highlight of my trip. But I will say it wasn’t a packed room. With The Caddy, I’m hoping it will be a packed room because it’s always fun to see comedy as part of a crowd.
And, for this screening, people will also see it positioned as essentially the final tipping point before Martin and Lewis’s relationship went into decline. It’s the film where Dean Martin finally rose out of the ashes. It’s the film that introduces the song That’s Amore, which will obviously be great fun to see with an audience. This is the first moment where Dean has consecrated his status as a solo performer. Up to that point, he’d released a lot of music, but never to the success of That’s Amore, which blew up. It went platinum. And at that point, there were sort of whisperings in his ear, “you can do without Jerry!”, “he’s holding you back!”. Arguably both true and untrue, given that Jerry did most of the work, but it’s an interesting film in that regard because it’s self-reflexive. It’s aware of this tension between them that would eventually become a feud in the year that followed The Caddy.
But it is a film that came out at the peak of their fame and it really does demonstrate what a big deal they were and why. I think it will be really interesting to watch what’s essentially a silly slapstick film with an informed audience who are aware of the dynamic that’s running through it, too.
So how does this film tie into or work with the other Martin and Lewis film that you’re programming as part of this strand?
This is the first part of a two-part Martin and Lewis anniversary screening at the Cinema Museum; well for now just two-part. It’s such a perfect space for I’ll Say She Is and especially for the Jerry Lewis focus because it’s where Charlie Chaplin lived as a child. It’s an incredible museum, especially exciting for classic Hollywood fans. I’m so grateful to the Cinema Museum staff for their support with these events. The Caddy introduces Martin and Lewis at the high point of their fame then shortly following this, on 29th September, I’m going to screen You’re Never Too Young (1955) and that will be looking more at the feud and the collapse of their relationship. It’s interesting to look at as part of a set.
I essentially chose The Caddy for my first screening because I thought, “if I have one chance in my life to show a Martin and Lewis film, I’m going to show The Caddy” because it reflects on so much that is interesting about Martin and Lewis. It’s got reflections on a fictionalised version of their stage act, it’s about class, it’s about feeling out of place in high society. I won’t list endlessly, you’ll have to come out in person to find out – there’s just so much to The Caddy. You’re Never Too Young pairs well with it because it came out the year after, during their infamous feud. As far as I’m aware, when You’re Never Too Young came out they were no longer really speaking and that’s how quickly the collapse of their relationship came.
But more on that at the screenings. The Caddy is, to me, the key Martin and Lewis film.
I’ll Say She Is! is a film night presented by curator Charlotte Ross, celebrating Old Hollywood comedy from early sound to the 1960s. Follow I’ll Say She Is! on Instagram. Get tickets for her first screening, The Caddy, here.
The Cinema Museum is a south London space dedicated to cinema and cinema-going history. Support their work here.