Jerry Lewis’s second film as director hangs a string of sketches on a boarding house built without its front wall, and the house is the star. At its best there is nothing else like it in American comedy; at its worst it is a man falling over.
Jerry Lewis’s first film as director, The Bellboy in 1960, had no plot at all, and he seems to have taken the complaints to heart. The Ladies Man has one, or the outline of one. Herbert H. Heebert, jilted on the day he graduates, gives up women and takes a job as houseboy in a Hollywood house that turns out to be lodgings for several dozen of them. Lewis and his co-writer Bill Richmond (the credits also list Mel Brooks) use that as a peg to hang sketches on. About half the sketches work. The house works all the way through, and the house is why you should see it.
It is a boarding house built on a soundstage with its front wall left off, so that the camera can pull back and look into every room at once, the way a child looks into a dolls’ house. W. Wallace Kelley lights it flat and bright, in the pinks and creams of a sweet shop, with no shadows for anyone to hide in. Early on there is a morning sequence in which every door opens together and the residents go about their routines to Walter Scharf’s music, while the camera drifts up and across the storeys taking it all in. We sat forward and grinned, and we do not grin easily at slapstick from 1961. Nothing else in American comedy of the period looks like it, and Lewis knew it.
The best material comes from the house too. George Raft turns up as himself and Herbert refuses to believe it, so Raft has to prove it, and the proof is a dance the two men do together that we are still not sure how to describe. Buddy Lester plays Willard C. Gainsborough, a hard man whose hat Herbert ruins in stages, and Lester’s slow burn is the funniest sustained thing in the film. And there is a room nobody is allowed into, entirely white, in which a woman in black is waiting and Harry James and his band appear from nowhere; Edith Head dresses the sequence so that the only dark thing in it is the one thing Herbert should not touch. It is the closest the film gets to a musical number without anyone singing.
The rest is patchier. Lewis the performer does not trust Lewis the director, and whenever a scene is not built around the set he falls back on the face, the whine and the walk into the wall, and these were tired by 1961. Each sketch stops dead before the next begins, and Stanley E. Johnson’s editing cannot smooth the joins because Lewis has not written any. A television crew arrives to broadcast from the house, with Westbrook Van Voorhis fronting it, and the sequence runs on well past its last joke. Jack LaLanne leads an exercise class that is one idea repeated. At 95 minutes the film is not long, and we were still looking at the clock around the seventy-minute mark.
The women in the house are furniture, which is a problem in a film about women. Helen Traubel, as Miss Helen N. Wellenmellon, is a good sport and gets to sing, and Kathleen Freeman, as the housekeeper Katie, is dry and exact in the way she always was. Pat Stanley’s Fay is meant to be the one who reaches Herbert, and the script gives her about four lines to do it with. Hope Holiday is billed as Miss Anxious, which tells you how much characterisation the rest received.
Set against Lewis’s own work, it is more ambitious than The Bellboy and less finished than The Nutty Professor, which came two years later and had a story that could carry its ideas. Most critics rate it around where we do. A few place it near the top of his films, and we understand why, because when the camera is moving through that house it is easy to forgive everything. The trouble is that the camera keeps stopping so that Herbert can knock something over.
Watch it for the house, and when a sketch dies on you, which it will, look past Herbert at the rooms behind him. There is always something going on in one of them.
