…or, Jerry Lewis, democrat. He got his chance to direct in early 1960, when he persuaded Paramount to hold back his newest comic vehicle, “Cinderfella” (directed by Frank Tashlin), until the Christmas season and agreed to give them something else to release in the summer. He learned much about precision and audacity from Tashlin; he infused the camera-conscious, frame-breaking form with a content all his own. “The Bellboy,” which I discuss in the clip above, features Lewis in a double role, and double roles are, in fact, the film’s subject. Lewis plays Stanley, the endearingly incompetent title character, who is employed in the Fontainebleau Hotel, in Miami Beach; he also plays himself, Jerry Lewis, big-time celebrity, whose entourage takes endless minutes to stream out of his limousine and surrounds him obsequiously in the hotel lobby. But the film features a host of other characters whose lives force them to hold double roles, the ones that Stanley and all of his uniformed colleagues in the hotel’s quasi-military service line have to play—first of all, themselves; and then, the one that, in the opening voice-over, detaches and demeans those men (and they are all men): namely, their official appellation as “bellboy.”
True to Lewis’s interest in the amorphous realms of identity, a comic intro by a fictitious Paramount executive (Jack Kruschen) declares the film to have “no story and no plot,” to be “a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut.” Of course, in a sense, Lewis is just setting his audience up for a rapidly assembled feature-length string of comic sketches. But he’s also setting up a theme of personal and even political substance, which he caps off in the film’s last line, which (not to spoil the gag) refers to “the other guy’s story.” That story, in Lewis’s view, is not a given; it has to be teased out empathetically, because it’s detached from a person’s public identity; but in Lewis’s humane utopia, it would be fused with public identity, would get expressed in the public sphere. And this movie, his first, is a brilliantly inventive step in that direction.
Last year, writing about Chris Fujiwara’s book about Lewis, I quoted a passage from the author’s ample interview with the filmmaker, in which the comedian’s divided character is exactly the issue. The insightful and self-revealing remarks are worth another look in the light of this movie.
P.S. It is, by now, a commonplace, but one that bears repeating: in 1956, Lewis had the idea for a closed-circuit TV camera to be mounted beside the movie camera so that, as a performer, he (and not just the director) could see the effect he was achieving on-screen, and he submitted a patent application for such a system. He put it into use on “The Bellboy”; a variant of his system is now the industry standard. Michael Frediani offers a detailed history of its development and a look at how Lewis used it.
