Chris Fujiwara has written a fascinating, detailed account of Jerry Lewis the director in this latest entry from the contemporary film directors series by University of Illinois press.  

Jerry Lewis is, of course, best known as a comedian whose career began as one half of a wildly popular comedy team with Dean Martin.  Martin and Lewis effectively conquered nightclubs, radio, television, and motion pictures during their ten years together, adding new dimensions to what would be considered the conventional comedy duo.

Upon splitting with Martin in 1956, Lewis embarked on a solo career, where long time aspirations of becoming a filmmaker along with being a comedian started to take hold.   He learned a great deal from his best director, Frank Tashlin, and embarked on his own projects beginning with The Bellboy (1960).  

Lewis created an offbeat, surreal universe in which comedy was a series of forms and functions.  Not merely interested in the action within each frame, Lewis explored uses of sound and color to enhance each comic set piece.  Self-directed Jerry Lewis features like The Bellboy, The Ladies Man (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963), and The Patsy (1964) remain among the most complex and brilliant screen comedies of their time.

Fujiwara explores Lewis’s choices as a director not by examining each film unto itself, but by assessing the filmmaker’s methods for arriving at certain structures for each project.  How Lewis approaches time and space, how he choreographs the action within each frame, his use of sound, and his method of presenting the character’s identity are each discussed with Fujiwara’s intelligent, keen eye for cinematic detail.

While concentrating completely on Lewis-directed films, Fujiwara also investigates the Lewis movies directed by the likes of Tashlin, George Marshall, and Norman Taurog, with the understanding that Lewis himself was often producer and would frequently make some contribution that would be evidenced by the finished product.  

Perhaps the most interesting passages are those discussing Which Way To The Front (1970), considered by many to be a lesser Lewis film, but one in which Fujiwara (and this writer) finds greater signficance.  Same goes for Lewis’s first release for Columbia Pictures,  Three on a Couch (1965), an offbeat, subdued comedy directed, but not written by, Lewis that Fujiwara examines for its presentation of different personalities in a manner that was far more effective than the tepid Boeing Boeing (1965), his last film for Paramount Pictures.

The book concludes with an extensive interview Fujiwara conducted with Lewis where the filmmaker answers the writer’s deeper questions with an intelligence and accurate recall rarely found in similar situations.

As someone who is quite familiar with the Jerry Lewis films, to the point of having co-written my own book on the subject, I am especially delighted that more studies on Jerry’s work are being released.  Chris Fujiwara’s book is most highly recommended to all who approach film beyond its purely visceral imagery and are able to appreciate the work of a true master of filmmaking.