Shrill, awkward, infantile, out of control, oblivious of his own behavior and only dimly aware of the effect it provokes, Jerry Lewis—or Herbert Heebert, his character in “The Ladies Man,” which I discuss in the clip above—is, or plays, a genius whose gift brings him little but trouble. In this 1961 movie, he’s the valedictorian of Milltown Junior College (Miltown, for those with long memories or large collections of Mad magazine, was a popular prescription tranquilizer sold in the fifties and sixties) who expects, after leaping through the graduation ceremony like a poorly trained primate, to find his childhood sweetheart waiting to marry him—and instead finds her in someone else’s arms. He heads to California to forget his hometown, his past, and his desires, and live out his days as a bachelor. The movie’s comedy results in his employment as a handyman in a boarding house that—unbeknownst to him—harbors only nubile young women; Lewis’s directorial genius is to make the house itself a metaphor for the inescapable world of women, and, seemingly, a projection of the nebbish’s own repressed desires.
Yet Lewis is no fantasist of the unspeakable; on the contrary, he is a democrat, whose notion of desire leads squarely (in both senses) back to social involvement and participation. He is a true leveler—and, comically, in “The Ladies Man,” Herbert levels a murderous gangster, a fearsome vixen, the whole pompous rigamarole of live television (which comes to install itself in the house) and even the great George Raft himself, who comes (playing himself) to the house for a date. And in this movie—his second as a director, after “The Bellboy”—Lewis turns his vision of comic comity choreographic, and sets the house jauntily in motion to a tune that arises spontaneously from an instant and unproblematic concord of interests. (Of course, the houseful of women is utterly unrepresentative of American society at large; as such, it bears the curse of the unquestioned exclusions, of which the classic Hollywood cinema is the exemplary image.) No one since Busby Berkeley, with his massive manipulations of crowds exulting in rhythm, had staged the social drama with such whimsical grandeur. But where Berkeley was a sort of sociobiologist who sought the sexual in the social, Lewis is exactly the opposite: for him, the sexual was a given, but one that was doomed to frustration in the absence of a place in the world. Berkeley: an insider whose desires headed outward, beyond the edge of the frame; Lewis: an outsider who sought a frame for his desires.
P.S. The great cutaway set of the house was taken up again, by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, in “Tout Va Bien,” from 1972—and, again, by Wes Anderson, in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”
