Word: jers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Seen today, their work, especially on TV, is startling not just for its inventiveness but for its almost erotic intensity. They worked literally nose to nose: Jerry would snuggle into Dean's shoulder; Dean would flick his cigarette ashes in Jerry's mouth (and lick Jer's face). It was primal therapy on the 12-inch screen, stripping bare a volatile marriage in all its grotesque intimacy - a bizarre comic display of love and resentment. No way it could last. In 1956, 10 years to the day after they had first paid, Martin and Lewis split, In a decade...
Lewis the solo movie star quickly found a comedy mentor: Frank Tashlin, whom Jer will surely thank tonight. A writer-director who had worked on some of the best wartime Warner Bros. animated shorts, Tashlin made his mark in feature films by turning such pliable stars as Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield into, essentially, cartoon characters. Lewis, already rubberized, was the ideal clay for Tashlin to mold, stretch and cheerfully mutilate; he directed two Martin-and-Lewis comedies, six more just with Jer, Geisha Boy and Cinderfella being the ones fizziest with anarchic ideas...
...director, Lewis put on film some of the most complex comic constructions - The Ladies' Man's open, multi-story set, The Bellboy's plot-ignoring series of sight gags (with Jer as the unspeaking hotel employee) - since the early masterpieces of Buster Keaton. Where Lewis went wrong was in also trying to be Charlie Chaplin: laying on the ennobling sentiment, but with a trowel. What the movies lacked was an audience interlocutor; without a figure like Dean Martin, viewers could laugh at Jerry but not always root...
...Some say Martin showed up in Lewis's most coherent film, The Nutty Professor, in 1963. A vamp on the Jekyll-Hyde story, it has Jer as ultra-nerd Julius Kelp, who sports goofy bangs (the following year they'd be cool, when the Beatles wore them), prominent teeth, and thick glasses - your basic Mo Rocca look. In love with adorable student Stella Stevens, Julius evolves chemically into Buddy Love, a stud crooner with hair glistening like a patent leather handbag. But this doppelganger was not the lush, uncaring satyr Dino (Martin played that role the following year in Billy...
...Jer, we sympathize; we admire; we're grateful. Your career has been a magnificent, traumatic ride, for you and the people who worked with you. And tonight, even if it's not the one you deserve, you finally got an Oscar. Hold that statuette with pride. But don't lick...