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As the old vaudevillian has it, "To thine own self be true." Volatile liquids across the Technicolor widescreen, the explosion introduces Jerry Lewis amid the rubble as a literal doormat. At the university he sinks into sofas and is stuffed into closets, a visit to the gym leaves only stretched limbs. (He labors at a pulley station and a 90° turn finds a repairman with screwdriver on the other side of the wall, split-screen sans split-screen.) "The inner man locked up," chemistry and heredity are the factors, a laboratory cocktail unleashes him in a most visceral nightmare (varicolored splatter, gnarled fangs, pinky ring on hairy paw), thus Buddy Love. "Split, schizo, all that jazz." A double portrait of the Lewis psyche, arrested klutz versus malefic hepcat, stylistically complex and emotionally raw. The coed in the middle (Stella Stevens) grows fuzzy in a parodical soft-focus close-up, a cut gives the whirling vibrancy of The Purple Pit, where the greasy lounge lizard materializes like a one-man Rat Pack. "Sickening, isn't it? But he's got something..." Maternal giantess and cowering Da-da in the primal remembrance, a wide-angle vantage for junior in the crib. Mamoulian's subjective tracking shot, Tashlin's squeaky shoes and squeakier socks, the vehement Persona query three years early: "The hopeless dream of being, not seeming." Geeky squawking and throaty insouciance dueling over "Black Magic," the Jungian tension of opposites embedded into an uncanny mise en scene of sharkskin suits and amplified vibrations. Elusive wholeness is achieved as a cavernous stage becomes a confessional, a mask excruciatingly dissolved before the whole world. "You might as well be yourself. Just think of all the time you're gonna have to spend with you." Echoes by Bertolucci (Partner) and Russell (Altered States) follow the obsessive artist who can't resist tripping over his camera during the curtain call. With Kathleen Freeman, Del Moore, Howard Morris, Norman Alden, Elvia Allman, Med Flory, Buddy Lester, and Henry Gibson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |