American Film comedy

For the past few weeks, I have been showing some friends examples of American film comedy. We began with silent comedy - Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, and Chaplin. Then we sampled the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Screwball Comedy, and Bob Hope. I wrote short notes for the evening's viewing. Anyhow, this week we are sampling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The film is Artists & Models. We also begin with a cartoon. Here are the notes for this week's viewing. Shall I post the other notes?

Puss ‘N Booty (1943)

            This is the last black and white cartoon made by Warner Brothers Studio. Leon Schlesinger was the producer. He first had his own studio and then came to run Warner’s cartoon unit. The Director of this film is Frank Tashlin who had worked with Schlesinger for some years. Tashlin would later go on to make live-action features such as The Paleface with Bob Hope and Artists & Models with Martin and Lewis. Tashlin made a number of films with Jerry Lewis. His films had something of a cartoon sensibility. Puss “N Booty is notable for its deviation from the standard cat-stalks-canary story line. Here the cat has actually eaten a canary, and we get to know something of its personality before the usual series of attacks on the bird cage. Tashlin keeps changing direction in the film. We have the opening search for the missing canary (feathers let us know that the cat has eaten the canary), the impatient wait for the arrival of the next canary, and the attempt of the cat to catch and eat this new canary. Then the “surprise” ending.

The Comedy Team

            For reasons that elude me, comedy likes to come in teams of two. Wheeler & Woolsey, Olson & Johnson, Allen & Rossi, Rowan & Martin, Tommy and Dick Smothers, and of course the better-known duos: Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Crosby & Hope, and Martin & Lewis. These are just a fraction of all the comic duos we have had on stage, on radio, on film, and on television. Typically the comic twosome consists of the gagman and the straight man. The straight man is the worldly one, experienced and serious; the gagman is the innocent, a child confronting a dangerous world. The straight man is also the ladies man, the good-looking one, whereas the comic foil is the jester, the clown, the funny-looking one. The straight man sets up the jokes or provides relief from the comic moments. In the case of Martin and Lewis, Dean Martin is usually the one who gets the girl (occasionally each of the comic team gets a girl – e.g. Artists & Models), and he is also the one who does the crooning. Dean is a singer, the Bing Crosby to Jerry Lewis’s Bob Hope. But Jerry is quite unlike Bob Hope in his infantilism. Jerry plays the boy to Dean’s adult. Jerry’s comedy relies on bodily and facial expression, voice, and physical contortion. He is a very visual comedian. His humour often relies on mime (see his film The Bellboy in which he does not speak at all). Early in Artists & Models, Jerry mimes eating a meal beginning with one bean and some ketchup. In fact, as a team Martin & Lewis began over time to focus more on the antics of Lewis than on the charm of Martin. After a 10-year partnership the duo separated in 1956. Lewis went on to make a series of films in which he gained more and more control and experimented with film form in interesting and comedic ways. As for Dean Martin, he went on to become an important recording artist and an actor in dramatic films.

Artists & Models (1955)

            1954 saw the publication of a book that has since become infamous: Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham’s book is an indictment of comic books and the comic book industry. It argues that comic books are destroying the moral fibre of America’s youth, inciting disobedience against parents, violence in schools, sexual deviance, and even smoking. The book was sufficiently influential that the government instituted the Comic Book Code, a form of censorship meant to ensure the moral purity of comic books. This bit of historical information informs the story in Artists & Models. In the film, Rick Todd (Dean Martin) is a comic book artist with aspirations of becoming a “real” artist. His roommate, Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis), is captivated by comics, especially comics with the character, Bat Lady. His infatuation with comics generates the first catastrophe in the film. Rick and Eugene have neighbours who also work in the comic book industry, two women, Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone) and Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The plot involves the two women connecting with the two men. The names of two of the characters let us know who will pair with whom (Fullstack and Sparrowbush are obviously meant for each other).

The comic book industry is notable for the lurid nature of its products. Much of the action turns on Eugene Fullstack’s dreams. These dreams provide sensational material for Rick’s comic books, but they also contain secret military information. This part of the plot gathers in another topical theme: the cold war and the fear of the Communist Menace. Espionage enters the plot. The year Artists & Models reaches the screens of America is the year, roughly, that the McCarthy paranoia abates. It abates, but it does not by any means disappear. The film is a spoof of earlier anti-Communist films such as The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954).

            The opening scene of the film involves a giant billboard with huge lips. (Why does this remind me of La Dolce Vita?) The play with this (at the time) high-tech gadget is clever and prurient. The jokes here are deeply embedded (as it were) to escape the censors. Indeed, much of this film skirts with censorable material. Probably the reason for this is the direction of Frank Tashlin. Tashlin began his career as a director of cartoons and when he graduated to live-action films, he brought his cartoon sensibility along with him. Artists & Models is noteworthy for its colour (something we will not fully appreciate in the washed out copy that we will see). The film is extremely colour conscious, as you might expect in a film about an artist. The comic book has always been a colourful medium (at least it has been so since the advent of inexpensive colour reproduction in newsprint and paper). The film, like comic books, is colourful. The first scene with those red lips and the three cans of paint that topple onto the big wigs draws attention to colour right at the beginning. This is a colourful film with flamboyant characters, lively songs, and zany antics.

            A side note: Jerry Lewis plays an aspiring children’s book author in the film, and the director Tashlin was himself a writer of children’s books.