Jerry Lewis makes one final swing for the fences and Katharine Hepburn and Nick Nolte in a Harold & Maude style rom-com?!

Plus Roger Deakins and The Kinks in case that wasn't strange enough

If a modern May looked the way this one has so far in terms of what kind of movies have been packed into every weekend, people would lose their minds.

I promise, there are some big movies coming. The last part of this May 1985 issue is going to be next time, and you’re going to be so pleased with the movies we get to discuss. Biiiiiiig summer movies. Fun stuff. Those are the reviews I’ve been revving up to write this entire month.

But in order to get there, we’ve got one more weekend of “What the fuck are you talking about?” to get through. Jerry Lewis pretty much puts a stake through the heart of his directing career in real time in our first movie, and it just gets weirder from there. Keep in mind… we’re only talking about theatrical releases here, so these are all films you could go see in a theater. There were films that occasionally just couldn’t find a distributor and they’d pop up on video first, but especially where I lived in Chattanooga, almost everything would eventually play a local theater, and if it didn’t, then Atlanta was just a few hours drive away.

So put yourself in the time and place. Imagine you go to a multiplex, looking to kill a few hours, and the following line-up is what you have to choose from…

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MAY 17

Cracking Up (aka Smorgasbord)
Jerry Lewis, Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., Herb Edelman, Foster Brooks, Zane Buzby, Dick Butkus, Francine York, John Abbott, Bill Richmond, Donna Ponterotto, Robin Bach, Buddy Lester, Paul Lambert, Ben Davidson, Tori Lysdahl, Herbert Wiere, Linda Hoy, Phil Rubenstein, Dale Ishimoto, Lawrence Gabriel Jr., Art LaFleur, Patrick Campbell, Michael Ross, Billy Holms, David Ankrum, Mary Peters, Michael Greene, Jodean Lawrence, Ron Troncatty, Manny Perry, Peggy Mondo, Jason Weiss, Ed Kerrigan, Randy Doney, Joey Sheck, Steve LaChance, Paul Reid Ronan, Ruta Lee
cinematography by Gerald Perry Finnerman
music by Morton Stevens
screenplay by Jerry Lewis & Bill Richmond
produced by Peter Nelson and Arnold H. Orgolini
directed by Jerry Lewis
Rated PG
1 hr 29 mins

Jerry Lewis embarrasses himself for over an hour.

The film opens with a long slapstick sequence of Jerry Lewis trying to kill himself in a hotel room. He tries to hang himself but the rope is too long and tied improperly. He closes his dick in a folding footstool. He eventually causes the entire hotel to collapse. He moves to a different hotel and keeps trying. He accidentally shoots a cowboy in a TV show who then shoots back and kills a bellhop. By the time the opening titles begin, we’ve already seen some of the most leaden gag work of his career play out, and we’re just getting started.

image courtesy of WBHV

Let’s be clear. I generally like the film career of Jerry Lewis, and I think he has made some truly great films, both as a performer and as a director. I also think that we have had very few film artists who have been as convinced of their own greatness as Jerry Lewis was, and when he’s at his worst, he can be almost insufferable. The entire opening title sequence here plays out as Jerry tries to walk in and take a seat in what appears to be the slickest office in the world. It’s just one long slow-motion pratfall, as Jerry tries to solve the problem (sit down without sliding off the seat) from a variety of angles. He tries to eat some candy. There’s a credit for “Opening Title Song Sung By Marcel Marceau” as we listen to the entirely instrumental opening title song. He turns on a stereo by mistake and it’s so loud that all the furniture starts to shake. And when the opening titles end, we cut to an entirely different scene and the movie just starts. That pretty much defines the movie’s entire aesthetic. There is nothing that builds from one scene to the next. It’s just a series of standalone pieces. It feels like a movie that was cut together from a number of other unfinished movies, and Lewis looks tired and embarrassed as he performs.

The film is framed by Warren (Lewis) telling his psychiatrist (Herb Edelman) the story of his life, allowing Lewis to cut to pretty much any short sketch he wants to. That includes telling stories of his historical relatives for some reason, so we get some sub-History of the World Part I stuff about Lewis in a 16th-century French prison, speaking broad goofy French for ten minutes. The biggest problem here is obvious: Lewis is too old to be playing most of these scenes. When he was young, there’s a certain manic energy that plays as funny. Here, he just seems deranged and angry most of the time. The original title of the film, Smorgasbord, seems more fitting and hints at the slapdash grab-bag nature of the movie.

This film was not released by Warner Bros; it escaped from the studio shelves. Filmed in 1983, the film was test released a few times in single screen engagements, twice in ’83 and once in ’84, and then dumped directly to home video, showing up on the PRISM channel and being released on videotape, before they gave it a real New York and Los Angeles theatrical release in 1985. This is the closest it got to an official release, but by that point, it existed under a few different titles and it had already been released in the rest of the world and forgotten. It’s a truly ignoble conclusion to Lewis’s filmography, and one of the worst comedies of the entire decade.