The head manager at the Florida Beach Fontainebleau Hotel disperses the crew, and eponymous bellhop Jerry Lewis scrambles to jerk himself in half a dozen directions at once, though the aim of Lewis the auteur is concentrated as a laser: namely, the construction of a comic cinematic language. A "series of silly sequences" for structure, thus no structure at all, the better for a budding "complete filmmaker" to relax the muscles and mold the screen into comic space as situations arise -- two rooms symmetrically arranged evoke the split-screen, but only as a direct outpour of the gag. Mentor Frank Tashlin is in the ambivalence toward celebrity and success, though even in his debut as a director Lewis understood himself as his own best prop, to be paraded, abstracted, and dissected over a succession of blackout sketches. Each segment is a movable block to be re-arranged by theme (vide Buñuel's The Milky Way), Lewis' analysis of the medium as rigorous as the limpid photography: the bellboy walks the whole depth of the deep-focus frame, then blackens the widescreen with the palm of his hand. A rotund matron checks in, calendar pages flutter, and out she comes slim, only to return to a plus-size, courtesy of Jerry's chocolate-box gift and a dissolve; later, a cut manipulates the Bazinian "realness" of a long-shot as a football field-sized auditorium is filled with rows of chairs. The bellboy is laughed at by pool divers, tormented by telephones, and beat up by warring couples, yet the flash of a camera turns night into day and, just to ponder what is considered "funny," Lewis drops in a boldly gratuitous bit of jazzed-up hillbilly kabuki between cabaret acts. Despite the explicit channeling of Stan Laurel, Jerry's whistling wanderer is less silent-movie little-guy than hepcat maestro wrapping the mise-en-scène around himself, artifice and reality questioned (Lewis plays an asshole version of himself next to Milton Berle, also given bellhop doppelganger), music emanating out of an empty orchestra, or is it an empty screen? With Alex Gerry, Bob Clayton, Sonnie Sands, Eddie Schaeffer, Herkie Styles, David Landfield, and Bill Richmond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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