Few things are more easily misunderstood or mocked than a comic artist who comes down with a case of ambition. In 1923, Charlie Chaplin was the object of derision for daring to write and direct a drama, "A Woman of Paris," and decades later, Woody Allen confounded some fans with his switch to more serious-minded subjects in films such as 1978's "Interiors."
Sandwiched in between Chaplin and Allen -- owing something to the first and clearly influencing the second -- was the actor-filmmaker Jerry Lewis, born a century ago this month. He died in 2017 at age 91. Unlike Chaplin and Allen, Lewis did not alienate viewers by turning to drama (though he experimented with dramatic material later in his career). To the contrary, he reliably churned out approachable mainstream comedies that were heartily embraced by moviegoers. Yet Lewis was vulnerable to disdain among the cognoscenti for the expressiveness and care with which he achieved what they considered lowbrow, slapsticky aims. Also subject to scorn were those critics who dared perceive Lewis's skill.
"An awful lot of Americans are in the dark as to why he is so almost sanctified by Europeans, particularly the French, as a filmmaker," Dick Cavett said to French director Jean-Luc Godard on his talk show in 1980. Godard countered with a robust defense of Lewis: "He's more a painter, maybe, than a director. . . . He's a very good framer, like great painters. He has a lot of sense of geometry. To be a comic, you have to be very capable in geometry."
An obstacle in accepting Lewis as a serious-minded director is that he first came to attention as an on-screen clown. Born in Newark, N.J., as Joseph Levitch, Lewis parlayed his talent for facial contortion, tolerance for taking pratfalls and, above all, capacity to channel the vitality and giddiness of a child into a perfectly calibrated partnership with singer Dean Martin. From 1946 to 1956, Martin and Lewis leaned into their dissimilarity: the former's intrinsic coolness and the latter’s everlasting zaniness.
Yet while appearing with Martin in their popular big-screen comedies -- including Frank Tashlin’s superb "Artists and Models" (1955), with Lewis as a comic-book-besotted man-child -- Lewis conscientiously absorbed the rudiments of moviemaking. "I was in the camera department more times than I was on the set making the movie," Lewis told Peter Bogdanovich in 2000. He added that he learned what not to do by observing lazy, inattentive directors. "You can't just say 'Print' because it's expedient, or you want to get on with the day," Lewis recalled telling one.
When Lewis started directing, no one could accuse him of expediency. As a performer, Lewis remained the same old kid -- frenzied, uninhibited, puerile -- but as a director, he quickly distinguished himself with loftier trademarks, including a gift for visual design and undisguised surrealism. Consider one of the better gags in his 1960 debut, the black-and-white comedy "The Bellboy": Low-on-the-totem-pole hotel bellboy Stanley (Lewis) is ordered by bellhop colleagues to arrange chairs in an unfathomably large ballroom. Lewis keeps his camera in a wide shot as Stanley strides, then runs, from one end of the empty ballroom to the other. Neither the audience nor Stanley’s prank-pulling associates expect him to complete the task, especially after he hauls out a single chair that he fusses with repeatedly. Then Lewis cuts to the same wide angle as before: The ballroom is now packed with perfectly arranged chairs -- a completely nonsensical development that we laugh at for its preposterousness and appreciate for its elegance.
In 1961’s “The Ladies Man,” Lewis plays heartbroken dweeb Herbert, who warily traipses through the female-filled boarding house at which he is employed, but the film endures for his imaginative filming of that open-faced set. With a fluidity reminiscent of Max Ophüls, his camera peeks in and around its multiple levels; one dazzling sequence has the whole troop of girls waking and primping, in different rooms on different floors, while Herbert snoozes. “The Ladies Man” announced that Lewis was a master of color photography, a verdict confirmed in his 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde farce “The Nutty Professor.” Underscoring the odiousness of the film’s Mr. Hyde, Buddy Love, Lewis places the character in a nightclub painted in the jarring hues of purple and mauve.
Notwithstanding his continued appearances in others’ movies -- including as a late-night TV host in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant “The King of Comedy” (1983) -- Lewis kept directing into the early 1990s. In “Hardly Working” (1980), Lewis still had the discipline to create a perfect composition and hold it -- such as when employment-challenged loser Bo Hooper (Lewis) sits at a breakfast table beside a prominent pitcher of milk that seems, for the length of the shot, begging to be knocked over (as it ultimately is). As likely to induce awe as laughter is the scene in his final feature, 1983’s “Cracking Up,” in which Lewis agonizingly navigates a room whose surfaces, furnishings and objects are uniformly slick and impossible to handle: It’s a study in man’s exasperation at the world around him.
Lewis’s earnest ambitions were confirmed by his choice to film a Holocaust drama in the early 1970s, the never-completed and unreleased “The Day the Clown Cried,” and a plangent brief for racial tolerance, the UNICEF short film “Boy” (1990). Lewis wrote a book, “The Total Film-Maker,” in which he expounded on his approach to his art. But to know how serious he was about it, all one needs to do is watch his movies.