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Electronics and detective stories, "a swell business," it puts Jesse White in trench coat and fedora and gets Godard's Lemmy Caution three years early. The kid (Jerry Lewis) is a TV repairman weaned on pulp fiction ("The Case of the Homicidal Homing Pigeon" and "The Corpse Came Gift-Wrapped" are among his favored texts), he latches on to the cranky shamus and helps with the case of the missing heir who turns out to be himself. The oily family attorney (Zachary Scott) schemes to snatch the fortune by marrying the late inventor's sister (Mae Questel), eliminating the snooping orphan is a job for the bloodthirsty butler (Jack Weston). (Proud "president of the Peter Lorre Fan Club," he's beside himself with glee when contemplating the methods of murder: "I just love strangulation! No muss, no fuss.") Frank Tashlin's surrealism in full bloom, tackling greedy technocrats in a furious vortex. Security cameras, electrified fences and automated vacuum-cleaners figure in the theme of haywire gadgetry, the testing of a new stereo system gets the living room quaking as a train roars through, ticket collector and all. (None of the electric sounds can compete with Questel warbling "Isn't It Romantic" in her old Fleischer Studios squeal.) Lewis' mug amid the tubes and transistors of a hollow television set is practically a Rauschenberg combine-canvas, a certain art-critique strain from The Bellboy continues with shaving cream and razor blade on an oil portrait. "Shut up, will you, while I get a clear picture!" The climactic rampage of one-eyed, saber-toothed lawnmowers sails straight into Michael Crichton's cerebellum, Sophocles himself loses his head over it. With Joan O'Brien, Barbara Pepper, and Francine York. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |