The Ladies Man (1961)

 

Director: Jerry Lewis

Screenplay: Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond

Cast: Jerry Lewis as Herbert H. Heebert/Marna Heebert; Helen Traubel as Helen N. Wellenmellon; Pat Stanley as Fay; Kathleen Freeman as Katie; Harry James as Harry; Buddy Lester as Willard C. Gainsborough; Gloria Jean as Gloria; Hope Holiday as Miss Anxious; Mary LaRoche as Miss Society; Ann McCrea as Miss Sexy Pot

Canon Fodder

 

Hey, lady!

After deciding to watch a Jerry Lewis film from a very bleak point of his career - Hardly Working (1980), post-The Day The Clown Cried, a financial hit but unintentionally and intentionally evoking how Lewis was a man out of time in the late seventies into the eighties - it felt wise to return to Lewis in his prime. After his success as a comedy duo with Dean Martin, at the time after his initial directorial work in black-and-white he transitioned to colour. And a lot suddenly makes sense, including why the French understandably liked him so much from seeing just one film. Whether it is learning how Jean-Luc Godard of all people was directly influenced by him, taking a key aspect of this film's aesthetic for Tout Va Bien (1972)¹, or how elaborate Lewis is a filmmaker at his prime, the other is realising that just by a hair The Ladies Man, which at the end of the day is an irrelevant comedy, was away from being abstract for me in category. It is definitely weird on purpose.

Lewis is Herbert H. Heebert in this film as director/co-writer/lead, fresh out of university graduation but traumatised when he found his sweetheart faith with another male student on the same day of the graduation. Wishing to be a permanent bachelor, he gets work at a boarding house only to learn late after the home held by former opera singer Helen N. Wellenmellon (Helen Traubel, an actual opera singer) is a home for women only, all wishing to find success in a variety of arts. And that is a lot of women as, with the budget from Paramount studios to pull this off, the main location of the film is a massive soundstage of a set where the camera can glide between rooms like a giant diorama, Herbert's life in this elaborate doll house now a torment where the occupants keep him there as a busy clerk by getting him to help in their work.

It is not a narrative driven work, a series of whimsical and silly skits where Lewis can be ridiculous or gags can transpire. The thing about the film, and where already I suspect the divide between those who dismiss Lewis and the actual fan base came to be is Lewis himself as a performer. Lewis the filmmaker, in his prime and a man who would innovate in filmmaking, is a very different figure from the man onscreen. Lewis the performer, with experience before these films, is an acquired taste. A broad, nebbish parody is here with his idiosyncratic nasal voice and bumbling form. Probably the thing which divides people on Lewis was never the films themselves but Lewis the performer, intentionally making himself these gangly and awkward figures like Herbert with strange names (Herbert H. Heebert is literally Herbert Herbert Heebert due to how his mother had to call him twice), and gags which can sometimes be too odd for a viewer. This is however also a film where Herbert also admits to killing his pet goldfish as a kid by taking it out of the fishbowl and sleeping with it so it was not earlier, which for a family friendly early sixties film is as black humoured as you can get.

The Ladies Man is fascinating to view long after the early sixties, as it is quaint, a farce which is earnest as a series of sketches of Herbert in his new job. When not destroying the valuable ornaments or trying to continually flee the house with his luggage only for a mass of young women to keep him there, his life within the boarding house even if following Lewis' gift for slapstick is incredibly peculiar, and wonderfully so. The key thing is how incredible the film looks, and that from this early film of his in vast contrast to one like Hardly Working, there was a time where Lewis the filmmaker commanded the ability to make distinct looking films like this. The key location, and how it is an elaborate construction where you can see through rooms with a glide of a camera for jokes, is exception as production. But a lot of the film is precise in style as well to match the main boarding house location, be it costumes by the legendary Edith Head to the emphasis on music, with one of the first a playfully elaborate musical sequence where each women, as the group are properly introduced, are matched by a musical melody that intermingle together. A lot of the film is alive because of how vibrant it feels, even if some of the gags may have aged.

Many of them however have an incredible oddness to them and come quickly. Some are still hilarious, such as the mean older man, like a gangster, ready to terrorise Herbert whilst waiting for his girlfriend, only to be left a broken man after the subsequent destruction of his hat and Herbert trying to make up for this. Or the disaster that is the television show broadcasting live in the boarding house, if only because you know when Herbert enters to find a whole bunch of television cables and cameras around, you think it is a disaster about to take place, only for the farce for him to charmingly be in shot by accident mid-broadcast. Lewis is broad, which is the one thing that has the potential to distract or even annoy a viewer, but everything else within the film is bright and breezy. A lot of emphasis on playfulness from the whole cast, even minor roles from the many women, is to be found, whether Hebert's ill-advised decision to help an aspiring actress practice her craft, leading to him being slapped a lot, to the amount of musical and dance sequences, dance suddenly breaking out within this heightened pastel coloured world with ease.

In fact, the strangeness of the film, and where it is willing to go, is fed as much by this world's ornate look. Jokes can be stretched to longer and more elaborate directions, such as the presence of a pet called "Baby", meant as a joke to be a pet lion to Herbert's concern, but taking in at least two twists by the end I will not spoil. Or the sequence which did nearly knock this film into fully qualifying as "abstract" for me or at least surreal, the running gag where Hebert  is warned never to enter the room of one of the occupants. What this transpires as, and cannot be spoilt by telling, is at first actual horror cinema with a strange pale white feminine figure hung upside-down from the ceiling, like a monstrous spider woman, only to break reality fully with a full musical band and dancing. It is a scene that by the end adds an exclamation mark to a film which won me over by that point. The level of humour is willing to take risks even long before this, to the point actor George Raft plays himself, with Herbert questioning him being the same actor of the 1932 version of Scarface, and a male duo dance in-between them.

And there is a hint to a theme there, Herbert the mother's boy who, heartbroken, has a complete neurosis about women as a result. When the only figure he is comfortable with is his own mother, played by Lewis himself in drag as a broad caricature, it is clear the director/co-writer is implying a lot more of this caricature lead even if just for humour, and the willingness to play the absurd fool, the sole real male character in the cast, surrounded by many women, and even sit in an adult size baby chair for one scene to be spoon fed really does show both Lewis' confidence in himself to be a clown onward and that the joke is as much the helpless male struggling throughout this film.

Layers like this, and how distinct and how clearly well made the film is, with care to its form, made this the perfect introduction to Jerry Lewis. I have seen his original version of The Nutty Professor, a long time ago, but that length of time ago was long before properly considering Lewis the filmmaker and star in detail. This, seeing a strange awkward point in Hardly Working, and finding virtue within it, and then this glorious spectacle, was triumphant as an introduction to the star and filmmaker proper.

 

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1) Also possibly Herschell Gordon Lewis, the infamous inventor of the splatter genre, as one of his tangents in his weird mid-to-late sixties career included How to Make a Doll (1968), which now comes off as an exploitation low budget attempt at a Lewis-like comedy, making it even stranger.