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The spazz in the harem, Jerry Lewis' Seven Chances. Out of the provincial cocoon ("a very nervous community"), the valedictorian with the Nabokovian double name embraces everlasting bachelorhood after catching his sweetheart with another fellow. (A single shot of Lewis in smeared maternal drag is held up like Freud's mirror.) To confront phobia head-on is the therapy, the patient is dropped right into the lion's den—hired as handyman in a boarding house, he watches in horror as the edifice comes alive to jazzy choreography and waves of comely tenants. Convinced to stay by the operatic dowager (Helen Traubel), the "skinny, unglued, crew-cut cat" is soon on a high chair being spoon-fed porridge. Four stories high and two sound-stages wide, the dollhouse of the mind has corkscrew staircases and color-coded chambers, the camera glides past them as if scanning comic-strip panels. Quicksand mattresses, wannabe starlets and runaway butterflies, a fabulous feminine swirl kept in check by the winking maid (Kathleen Freeman). Meanwhile, the mantle of masculinity falls on Buddy Lester's fearsome deadpan as a scarred tough reduced to a quivering puddle by a squashed fedora, along with the old gangster himself, George Raft fumbling his coin-toss but acing a tango. (In between lies Lewis, offering slabs of meat to unseen beasts and getting mangled bones in return.) Like Bluebeard's castle, there is a forbidden room: The blanched dream realm of the slinky vamp (Sylvia Lewis) with Harry James' orchestra in the terrace, an unforgettable interlude (cf. Tsai's Visage). "Boy, what imagination can do for you!" The ingénue (Pat Stanley) spells out the saccharine moral ("nice persons are needed everywhere"), but this spectacular masterwork hinges more trenchantly on the desire and despair of the Lewis schnook, forever "alone with noise." With Hope Holiday, Gloria Jean, Lillian Briggs, Mary La Roche, Dee Arlen, and Madlyn Rhue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |