Who's Minding the Store?

Chabrol has the opening in The Champagne Murders, the black-suited messengers here bring the department-store doyenne (Agnes Moorehead) some choice footage of her potential son-in-law. "A slope-shouldered, Weehawken-born animal-sitter and poodle dog-walker," who else but Jerry Lewis, also an incorrigible soup-slurper. The heiress (Jill St. John) works incognito as an elevator operator, Dad (John McGiver) is the latest in a line of henpecked figureheads, a tale of high places. "Oh, nosebleeds don't bother me." The setting is the consumerist temple of a thousand chambers (motto: "Everything for Everybody Under One Roof"), the perfect Frank Tashlin playpen. Maniacal exercise bicycles, crushed mattresses, flying canoes. Harold Lloyd for the flagpole in need of painting, Buster Keaton for the feminine stampede at the bargain blowout. (Lewis' typewriter pantomime is his own, with a grain of Stan Laurel.) "What items are you going to push?" "Myself, out of a tall building." Integrity versus business, a sumptuous treatment of persistent Tashlin themes. Nancy Kulp rules the rifle department as a big game huntress, Peggy Mondo steamrolls the schnook as the lady wrestler in the shoe shop, Fritz Feld as the wizened gourmet feeding the hero a spoonful of mashed insects is remembered by Pasolini in Salò. As the manager, Ray Walston reaches into a decapitated mannequin's décolletage and gets a bucket of gold paint dumped on his noggin: "The more I rub, the shinier it gets!" The rampaging vacuum cleaner is a cartoonist's coup de grâce, the system implodes with giddy reference to Clampett's Porky's Poppa. Love wins in a characteristic image—a kiss at the center of a mechanical wreckage. With Francesca Bellini, John Abbott, Isobel Elsom, Kathleen Freeman, and Dick Wessel.