Jerry Lewis in ARTISTS AND MODELS.
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This entry was posted on May 20, 2010 at 7:53 pm and is filed under FILM with tags Artists and Models, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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May 20, 2010 at 9:38 pm
the fat lady?..no the BAT LADY THE BAT LADY!
May 20, 2010 at 10:25 pm
I saw this when it first came out. It was a double feature with The Trouble With Harry. Pretty clear that Shirley was a force to be reckoned with.
May 20, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Absolutely! Shirley in a bat costume is pretty awe-inspiring. And Shirley in a bat costume in bondage… just wrong. So wrong it’s right.
She’s also possibly the best leading lady Jer ever had (and he had some amazing ones — Stella Stevens comes to mind at once).
May 20, 2010 at 11:12 pm
She was a good match in <i.Artists and Models as she’s close to a female Jerry.
Stella Stevesn, by contrast is Stella By Starlight
May 20, 2010 at 11:36 pm
this movie really stands apart from the other Martin and Lewis films to me…Not too many comedies about the comic book industry…don’t forget Vincent the Vulture..”the GORE oozing out of his tail!”
May 21, 2010 at 2:05 am
Edward Yang tipped his at to A&M at the beginning of A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY.
May 21, 2010 at 2:07 am
hat
Blast you, moving train/crashy iPhone!
May 21, 2010 at 3:02 am
I recently got to see ARTISTS AND MODELS and for me that is an all-time masterpiece, and Jerry Lewis gives one of cinema’s greatest performances.
Tashlin was there before the 60s culture theorists – he made the best film about rock-and-roll, the best film about advertising, Artists and Models is something else, a ”trip” into the American subconscious of the 50s, which Tashlin does through comic books. The use of VistaVision is amazingly beautiful.
May 21, 2010 at 4:09 am
Indeed. It’s one of his masterpieces along with Hollywood or Bust, The Disorderly Orderly, The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter.
May 21, 2010 at 4:47 am
Don’t forget:
THE STUPID CUPID
PUSS N’ BOOTY
PORKY PIG’S FEAT
THE WOODS ARE FULL OF CUCKOOS
LITTLE PANCHO VANILLA
PORKY IN THE NORTH WOODS
and so on
May 21, 2010 at 10:44 am
A lot of Tashlin’s cartoons were b&w and don’t get shown anymore, but there are a fair few on YouTube. I recommend this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3luD3qdbfI
There are grace notes in even the weakest Tashlins, even The Private Navy of Sgt O’Farrell, which is mostly painful in the extreme. There are about five brilliant minutes in The Glass Bottom Boat, all crammed together about an hour in.
Son of Paleface kind of warped my brain as a kid.
Fiona was impressed by the idea of a female comic book artist, surely a rarity at the time the film’s set, though that’s no doubt mainly a plot contrivance rather than a statement. Dorothy Malone looks cute in her specs at her drawing board.
May 21, 2010 at 11:34 am
The plot is one thing that doesn’t make a great deal of sense in ”Artists and Models” like Dorothy Malone writes comics for the money and then she becomes part of the anti-comics committee and it’s never really clarified. It’s very much in the style Von Ellstein warned against in The Bad and the Beautiful, “I can make this scene a climax, I can make every scene a climax” and that’s Tashlin in that film, yet thanks to Martin and Lewis, it works brilliantly. The film has a very dreamlike feel, as if the whole thing is taking place in the Jerry Lewis character’s imagination and the visual design is up for that, with Dean Martin making his ravings into bestselllers and the Cold War morons targetting him for death.
May 21, 2010 at 11:34 am
Small wonder it influenced Jacques Rivette’s ”Celine and Julie Go Boating”…
May 21, 2010 at 11:43 am
JLG was very enthusiastic about it also. It’s never explained how Lewis manages to dream government secrets, and the thriller plot crashes into the film after more than an hour, just to provide a climax which doesn’t settle anything apart from the romances. The comic book debate is entirely forgotten. I do like how the censors are as ridiculous as the comic book pros, and the prophetic way the sleazy publisher is called Murdoch (a favourite name of Tashlin’s, along with Schmidlap).
May 21, 2010 at 12:31 pm
It has the feel of a live-action MAD issue and yet what makes it so universal is the way the film is structured around the fact that almost everyone in the film is out to exploit Jerry Lewis who is essentially an innocent man-child. I think it’s Tashlin’s best, of the ones I’ve seen so far. It has an aesthetic achievement that’s singular.
May 21, 2010 at 6:16 pm
> dream government secrets
That twist showed up again, later, in Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Zap Gun.”
May 21, 2010 at 8:23 pm
That’s a fascinating connection. While I doubt Tashlin knew Dick’s work, I somehow feel sure Dick saw some Jerry Lewis movies…
It’s true, Arthur, everyone in the movie has secret designs on Jer, even Shirley MacLaine (nicely cast as a new age nut!) and despite having been supposedly perverted by comic books, he’s the only innocent.