Jerry Lewis © AFP
CINEMA DE LA PLAGE – Jerry Lewis on all fronts
Jerry Lewis is being honoured at the sixty-sixth Festival de Cannes, with Max Rose by Daniel Noah in a Special Screening, but also with The Ladies Man, a feature film from 1961 where the actor outdid himself both on camera and behind it.
Jerry Lewis is in Cannes. At 87 years of age, he is one of the last living burlesque comedians from a certain golden age of American comedy. The clownish actor had his first stage performance at the age of fifteen. When he was twenty, he met Dean Martin, who would become his accomplice for over a decade. The duo that had their beginnings in the cabaret circuit even got their own television show on NBC.
Martin & Lewis
After their separation, during the 1960s, Lewis turned director himself: first with The Bellboy (1960) and then with The Ladies Man,
in which he plays a young graduate who gives up on women. As luck would have it, he finds himself having to work in a home for young women, who give him a run for his money.
This immersion into the feminine realm is of course the pretext for a whole spate of gags (grimaces, imitations, slow-burn) that only Lewis can bring off. However, behind the apparent frivolity there is a real critique of the illusions of the world of show business, for example in the credits, where Jerry Lewis highjacks the posters for films and mimics Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
Lisa Revil
SCREENING
Friday 24 May / Cinéma de la plage / 9:30 pm
