The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955).
By rights, Martin and Lewis should have the kind of cultural footprint renders them permanent household names: the status that turns artists into Halloween costumes, as archetypal as cartoon characters and ancient gods. For ten years, from 1946 to 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were a double act, and accurately describing how popular they were sounds like gross exaggeration. They were so big that the only fitting comparisons are to rock stars—and not just any rock stars, but Elvis Presley, or The Beatles. “For ten years after World War II, Dean and I were not only the most successful show-business act in history,” Jerry Lewis wrote with his trademark humility in Dean and Me: A Love Story (1984), “—we were history.” Their live shows were pandemonium. They reportedly made eleven million dollars in 1951 alone. Their movies were box office smashes (despite lukewarm reviews). No less an authority than Orson Welles said they were so funny that you "would piss your pants.”
Martin and Lewis have never been erased from cultural history, but they have been minimized: evaded, elided, downplayed. I was well into adulthood when I even learned that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had spent a decade as a double act. Their separate images—Dean Martin, Rat Packer, king of cool, and Jerry Lewis, doing wacky slapstick in The Bellboy (1960) or The Nutty Professor (1963)—seem to have endured in cultural memory much more than their work together. Maybe that’s because the willingness to go back and watch old episodes of The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950–55) would be extremely niche even if the media conglomerates cared about the preservation and accessibility of 1950s TV, not to mention 1940s radio. Maybe it’s because their true brilliance was in live—often improvised—performance, and so only shadows of their greatness remain. Their films were and are often viewed as pretty haphazard affairs, cashing in on a hot thing, not unlike Elvis’s movies in the decade that followed. (Martin and Lewis’s movies share a producer with Elvis’s—Hal B. Wallis—and sometimes directors, too, particularly Norman Taurog.) But the extraordinary thing is that, even if the films are just slapdash and shadows, Martin and Lewis were so great that their films are great films anyway. Their brilliance shines through the weakest material: the ineffable, bewitching something between them—an intimacy, an immediacy, an ingenuity—frozen in amber for those of us who would never see it in the Copacabana.
Lewis’s solo films, many of which he directed as well as starred in, were praised by French critics of the Cahiers du cinéma set—Jean-Luc Godard once told Dick Cavett that Lewis was "more a painter ... than a director"—often to the bafflement of the anglophone film world. Even as devoted an auteurist as Andrew Sarris, in his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions: 1929-1968, felt the need to “take a stand against Jerry Lewis.” The English-speaking world has started to catch up, folding Lewis into established cinephilia decades later. But if solo Lewis is and has been divisive—a misunderstood genius or a cringeworthy narcissist, depending on who you ask—critics have neglected Martin and Lewis, despite Lewis consistently identifying Martin and Lewis as the creative and comedic high point of his long and varied career. One of the only polysyllabic answers he gives in his infamous 2016 Hollywood Reporter interview was when he was asked for a period in his life or career he remembers the fondest: “When my partner was alive.”
Sarris builds a key point of his argument against Lewis by citing the obvious superiority of his work with Dean Martin, saying that The Nutty Professor is Lewis’s best film in part because it recreates the electrifying tension of Martin and Lewis through Lewis’s dual role: when Lewis transforms from the gawky Julius Kelp into the suave lady-killer Buddy Love, he’s effectively transforming from Jerry to Dean. For Sarris, writing in 1968, the greatness of Jerry Lewis was a debate; the greatness of Martin and Lewis was a given. (Even if he dismisses their movies.)
Scared Stiff (George Marshall, 1953).
Martin and Lewis are counterintuitive as a double act. A classically constructed male comedy partnership is underpinned by physical difference—a taller guy and a shorter one, a fat guy and a skinny one, an unattractive guy and a guy who looks more handsome when they’re standing next to each other—and an underlying cohesion: an “us against the world” orientation that transcends any acrimony, spanning from Laurel and Hardy to David Spade and Chris Farley, from R2D2 and C3PO to Vladimir and Estragon. They might be opposites, but they have more common ground with each other than they could ever have with outsiders. With Martin and Lewis, this paradigm is almost reversed. They were the exact same height (six feet, one inch tall) and both classically good-looking, despite Lewis’s efforts to disguise both. As for an underlying us-against-the-world cohesion, it’s hard to imagine any outsider they wouldn’t have more in common with than each other: Martin is smooth as butter, honey-voiced, often a scam artist and always a ladies’ man, while Lewis’s character is zany, naïve, awkward, effeminate, and perpetually dialed up to eleven. A handsome man and his monkey, Lewis said. You could compare them to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, who didn’t pair along the physical difference/underlying cohesion paradigm either, and who had a cameo in the Martin and Lewis movie Scared Stiff (1953) the year after Martin and Lewis cameoed in Hope and Crosby’s Road to Bali (1951). But there is a rough-and-tumble masculinity to Hope and Crosby, playing, as Noel Murray describes them for the AV Club, “horny, savvy underdogs” competing for the affections of Dorothy Lamour. They’re lads’ lads. Not so Martin and Lewis.
In his mystery novel Where The Truth Lies, Rupert Holmes writes about his story’s barely-concealed Martin and Lewis analogues that they “were really doing a boy-girl act” with two men. Dean Martin was the guy and Jerry Lewis “was the equivalent of the goofy dame.” Their films remade screwball comedies (The Major and the Minor [1942] as You’re Never Too Young [1955], Nothing Sacred [1937] as Living It Up [1954]) with Lewis in the female role. Rather than any male double act, their dynamic most resembled George Burns and Gracie Allen: Jerry Lewis, like Gracie Allen, was silly, wacky, moronic; and Dean Martin, like George Burns, was an extraordinary straight man. (According to Jerry Lewis, Burns called Dean Martin the greatest straight man he had ever seen.) And just as Burns and Allen were a married couple, Martin and Lewis were “partners.” “Every culture has its own tragic love story. Anna and Vronsky, Catherine and Heathcliff, Tristan and Isolde,” Alessandra Stanley writes in The New York Times in a feature on TV biopic Martin & Lewis (2002), “Americans have Jerry and Dean.”
At War with the Army (Hal Walker, 1950).
Even though Lewis describes Martin as being like his big brother, the intimacy, intensity, and explosiveness that runs through a decade in each other’s pockets, through their breakup, through their eventual make-up on live television—it’s shaped like a romance. Lewis's memoir about the partnership is called Dean & Me: A Love Story, and there is nothing ironic, nothing winking, about that title. Lewis bought Martin diamond studs for his tuxedo and matching diamond cufflinks to go with them, not to mention a gold watch, golf clubs, and a solid gold flask. Lewis’s first wife, Patti, said that her husband was really married to two people: she once told a story about Martin riding in the ambulance with Lewis after he hurt his back, rather than her (and despite Martin’s claustrophobia). Lewis described their breakup as like losing a limb. At their reunion at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon in 1976, Frank Sinatra had to scold Dean to focus on their performance together because he kept looking over at Jerry, waving and smiling. Long after Dean Martin died, Jerry Lewis continued to dream about him “twice a week”—and still referred to him almost exclusively as “my partner.” Partner might be the only word rich enough in ambiguity to capture what they were to each other.
If the duo's offscreen relationship was complex but platonic, the tenor of their stage and screen relationship was often homoerotic. Touching, kissing, declarations of devotion are par for the course; their eyes are constantly alight with love when they look at each other, even when they weren’t speaking off-screen. “While in life they were both prolific womanizers … their partnership seemed to exist on another plane – somewhere on the Kinsey scale between questioning and queer,” as Jenna Ipcar put it for Bright Wall/Dark Room, “They couldn’t seem to keep their hands off of each other, jumping in each other’s arms, hands on faces, noses smooshed together when they weren’t out-and-out kissing.”
Watching Martin and Lewis movies at seventy years’ distance, what could not be spoken becomes impossible to ignore: this is queer cinema. “People were frightened,” The Wall Street Journal quotes Jerry Lewis saying, “of a homosexual probability." WSJ presents this as a baffling non-sequitur. The queer sensibility of Martin and Lewis is both obvious and invisible—a glass closet of plausible deniability. It’s no wonder Billy Wilder originally offered Jerry Lewis the Jack Lemmon role in Some Like It Hot (1959): Wilder’s taboo-busting, gender-bending comedy is the best Martin and Lewis movie never made. (Lewis said he turned down Some Like It Hot because he didn’t want to do drag, a claim belied by almost any Martin and Lewis movie or sketch.)
Sailor Beware (Hal Walker, 1952).
In most of Martin and Lewis’s films, they play the same characters in all but name. They might be Steve and Seymour, or Rick and Eugene, or Bill and Ted, but they’re always really Dean and Jerry: not playing themselves, by any means, but playing the same parts they developed on stage, radio, and TV. Sometimes Dean is a heel with a heart of gold, who tries to take advantage of foolish, trusting Jerry, but learns to love him by the end. Sometimes, they’re already best friends, roommates, and partners (in comedy, cowboying, or otherwise). The plots, especially in the early films, are often a thin pretext for getting from one of their club routines to another. At War with the Army (1950), their first pairing as leads, isn’t a movie so much as a couple of episodes of a multi-camera sitcom in disguise. Sailor Beware (1952) has no plot whatsoever, though it does briefly present the origin story of whether Dean or Jerry get the top bunk. This plotlessness and lack of polish is generally what people—even Martin and Lewis fans—dislike about their movies: they’re carelessly slapped together, or so the story goes. But even at their most slapdash, even when the film’s seem to exist solely to get the duo from routine to routine, those routines are fantastic. Dean and Jerry act out a whole scene from Going My Way (1944) in pitch-perfect Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald impressions, all the funnier because they play it straight. Jerry hanging off a periscope, or having no blood left in his body after an over-enthusiastic trip to the blood bank, are an excuse for some of the wackiest, most rubber-boned slapstick put to film. Even when the material is weaker, their chemistry is fizzy and addictive, making Martin and Lewis compulsively watchable regardless of the film around them. If it was difficult to translate the anarchic quality of their live shows onto the big screen, even a partial, incomplete translation is still side-splitting.
But it’s a mistake to assume all their films together are loosely strung together best-of compilations. Their best films—especially the later ones—are not just cinematic; they use the form of the feature film to tap into new, deeper magic between Martin and Lewis in a way a sketch cannot. We get character arcs and tightly plotted farce, even as the cartoon logic of their comic world escalates to lunar levels. In Living It Up, Jerry fakes a terminal illness to get a free trip to New York City, and Dean is the doctor who mistakenly diagnosed him as terminal because he’s a terrible doctor who came last in his class and Jerry had a watch in his breast pocket during the X-ray. The humor in Living It Up is driven by characters and relationships in a way that Jerry Lewis finding excuses to do his 1940s lip-syncing routine in Money from Home (1953) is not. In a perfect character detail for his underachieving doctor, when Dean puts glasses on, he also puts on a glasses voice: a serious, somber tone to go with his serious, bespectacled face. It helps that Living It Up was a remake of Nothing Sacred, giving them a narrative structure to hang jokes on. But once they cracked that, their original movies started to develop a more rigid shape, too: more structured than the wanderings of Sailor Beware, without sacrificing an anarchic appeal.
The Stooge (Normal Taurog, 1952).
The midpoint between their tightly plotted, character-driven comedies and slapdash, borderline-sketch-movies is The Stooge (1952), directed by Norman Taurog. The Stooge is the platonic ideal of a Martin and Lewis movie. Like so many of their films, Dean takes advantage of Jerry but slowly learns to love and appreciate him. In real life, Martin and Lewis became a comedy team when, while both separately playing the same club and bombing, Lewis started to interrupt Martin’s act with jokes: hollering “who ordered the steak?!” from the audience in a busboy uniform while Martin was on stage. Martin rolled with it, bouncing off Lewis effortlessly, and they quickly realized messing around together went over better than either of their individual acts. In The Stooge, the same thing happens by accident. Dean is a singer and accordion player who splits from his stage partner. When his solo act goes down like a lead balloon, he hires Jerry as a “stooge,” initially a “song plugger” to pull out of the audience and introduce as the songwriter. But Jerry is funny, and slowly becomes a bigger and bigger part of the act—without ever receiving billing.
In the stage sequences, The Stooge comes closer than anything outside of The Colgate Comedy Hour to capturing the riotous vibe of the duo’s club shows. But the film is sustained by the emotional resonance of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s performances. Dean sincerely argues that his accordion deserves billing more than Jerry does, even if Jerry is why he’s selling out theaters. Meanwhile, Jerry’s devotion to Dean is such that he rejects any suggestion that his partner might be taking advantage of him. Jerry loves Dean so much that in the end, Dean inevitably loves him right back. When Dean performs alone—bombing—he realizes how badly he mistreated Jerry. But Jerry’s out there in the audience, sitting in the box, and reveals himself to sing his half of their duet: “Who’s your little whosit? Who’s your turtle dove?” The viewer’s heart soars; Dean’s heart must soar, too. They love each other: you can see it in their faces.
That electricity between them is the basic appeal of all Martin and Lewis’s work together. And in their films directed by Frank Tashlin—their best, and among the best films ever made—the full possibilities of their comic universe are unlocked while that relationship comes into clearer focus. Tashlin had directed some live-action comedies prior to Artists and Models (1955), but he was best-known for his work as an animator, primarily for Looney Tunes. Hal B. Wallis hired him to direct Artists and Models in part because he thought an animator made sense to direct a movie about comic books. And while that’s a silly reason, Tashlin’s Looney Tunes sensibility dovetails beautifully with the zaniest of Martin and Lewis’s humor. When Jerry is kissed, the toes of his shoes peel back, like a live-action cartoon.
Artists and Models (1955).
In Artists and Models, Dean and Jerry are roommates and best friends: Dean is a struggling painter, Jerry dreams of being a children’s author and has a mind addled by comic books. They eat dinner together by candlelight and sleep in twin beds in the same room, like Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Their money troubles leave them desperate for work and threaten to drive them apart. Early on, Dean suggests a divorce—his word, not mine. The camera holds on a wide shot of him packing his case, explaining that they’ve been together too long, that this is the only way out, that Jerry can have the whole apartment. He’s trying to convince Jerry it’s a good idea, and maybe trying to convince himself, too. Then he looks at Jerry, and tosses everything back out of his suitcase. Cut, finally, to the reverse shot of Jerry in the doorway, tears in his eyes. It’s such an elegant piece of directing: using the language of cinema to convey the frustration and devotion at play between the two men. The camera holds on Dean, letting the audience see him go through a whole emotional cycle of wanting to leave and wanting to stay. We don’t see Jerry’s reaction to Dean leaving him, so by the time we do, he’s smiling through his tears.
Dean and Jerry’s neighbors are Abigail (Dorothy Malone), a comic book artist, and Bessie (Shirley MacLaine), who acts as the model for Abigail’s Bat Lady comics (Jerry’s favorite). Abigail and Bessie aren’t exactly gender-swapped Dean and Jerry, but pretty close: MacLaine is resplendent as ditzy, horoscope-obsessed Bessie, every inch Jerry Lewis’s comedic equal where the female leads in these movies are so often thanklessly feeding him straight lines.
Sick of the violence her publisher demands, Abigail becomes an anti-comics activist, dragging Jerry to a government hearing to use as an exhibit of how comics rot the mind. Clockwork farce spins out from there: Dean gets a job drawing comics—their money troubles are over, so Jerry gives him a kiss from their landlady, and a second kiss from him—but he keeps the job a secret from Abigail, who keeps her own comics drawing a secret from Dean. Hijinks ensue in a comedy of errors that has an animator’s outrageous sense of the possible: by the third act, we get a Cold War conspiracy turn. And it works.
Hollywood or Bust (Frank Tashlin, 1956).
Tashlin also directed Martin and Lewis’s final film together, 1956’s Hollywood or Bust. As in all Martin and Lewis movies where they aren’t already partners, Jerry is Jerry, and Dean Martin is a scam artist who learns to love him. This time, Jerry is a movie obsessive who wins a brand new Chrysler New Yorker convertible in a cinema’s raffle, and Dean is a gambler who forges a second winning ticket so he can sell the car to pay off his debts. The cinema declares them both winners, and they drive across the country so Jerry can meet Anita Ekberg, his favorite actress—if Dean doesn’t steal the car first. The two of them and Jerry’s Great Dane, the memorable Mr. Bascomb, pile into the convertible and drive across the country. Along the way, Jerry’s dog foils Dean’s many attempts to steal the car, and, slowly, inevitably, Dean starts to care for Jerry.
Hollywood or Bust has a cartoon’s logic—and a cartoon’s sense of color. Both Hollywood or Bust and Artists and Models are marvels of 1950s Technicolor that make it feel absurd that anyone tried to make Martin and Lewis movies in black and white. They belong in primary-color, bright worlds, reflecting the bright, colorful sparks between them.
There is something perverse about Martin and Lewis reenacting, over and over, Dean failing to appreciate Jerry and learning to love him enough when the reality was quite the opposite. Their breakup was largely because Lewis got a swollen head, becoming an egomaniac bully, denigrating Martin’s contributions to their act. Martin, for his part, choked, claustrophobic, on their relentless proximity: whenever he tried to pull back, Lewis would hold on all the tighter. Lewis spent the rest of his career learning just how special and talented Martin was, when no one could do what Martin did instinctively. He’d loved Martin terribly, giving gifts of gold watches and walking in the rain to buy him soup when he was sick, but not quite in the way that Martin seemed to need. He’d treated Martin like a stooge. It’s a tragic love story made all the more sad because they acted it out over and over with roles reversed, but never quite saw it from the other’s perspective.
The lesson of Martin and Lewis is that love can’t last. The lesson of Martin and Lewis is that love endures through everything, even death. The lesson of Martin and Lewis is that which binds is what pulls apart: the differences which appear complementary in one light seem lacking in another. In another light, they appear as threats. Friction is part of every great creative partnership, and it is what, eventually, grinds the thing to a halt.
But for ten years, the friction between Martin and Lewis made a spark. Together, they bottled lightning.