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Between Robbe-Grillet and Pynchon, the bleak hilarity of utter breakdown. Jerry Lewis' camera moves from a close-up to an aerial shot for the opening credits, then descends to find himself as the dope on the surf. Vacationing in San Diego for the meek bank examiner means reeling in an absconding thief in scuba gear, turns out he's his doppelgänger with sundry gangsters on his trail. An indecipherable map, the damsel (Susan Bay) in the maze of the hotel, the reality of a Colonel Sanders cameo amid a procession of slapdash disguises. "Now he looks like a dead crook and a live creep, take your pick." Incommunicability, Antonioni's favorite theme in a kaleidoscopic treatment reaching back to The Bellboy. Police officers can't get their own codes straight, the fugitive's troubles fall on the world's deaf ears, you'd have to be mad to believe him. The protagonist can't cross a lawn without being nearly drowned by sprinklers, yet his mere presence is enough to short-circuit the macho veneers of his underworld pursuers: One hood (Vern Rowe) slips into canine catatonia, another (Buddy Lester) crumbles into garbled grumbling, the last (Charlie Callas) quakes into spastic shtick. "Confused? You're not alone. There's more." A tennis interlude (cf. Godard and Gorin's Vladimir et Rosa), an august workshop on the link between Kabuki and slapstick. The chase, the henchmen with hand cannons, the sparkling MacGuffin, the whole Hitchcockian schmeer at Sea World, also Fu Manchu, why not? The great revelation for Lewis is to pull his own self out of the ocean, a matter of evolution. "Incredible, right?" The ending cites Kiss Me Deadly, and there's Frank De Vol as the Greek chorus with no pants. With Harold J. Stone, Del Moore, Paul Lambert, Jeannine Riley, and Leonard Stone.
--- Fernando F. Croce |