PARIS—Some lazy cultural stereotypes exist for a reason, especially where the French are concerned. In Paris, for example, you can find snails on every other menu and not infrequently spot attractive people bicycling past picturesque sidewalk cafés with fresh baguettes poking out of their baskets. Frenchwomen stay thin, age gracefully, and accessorize with innate genius, just as Francophilic advice books describe (scarves!), while Frenchmen really do fight with their feet, because kicking is allowed in French-rules boxing.
And now this: my own exhaustive investigation has uncovered new evidence that, indeed, the French love Jerry Lewis and take his work very seriously—a hoary punchline, yes, but not a myth.
The setting: a small movie theater on Paris’s Left Bank, not far from the Latin Quarter as well as the chic stores on rue de Grenelle and boulevard Saint-Germain. The time: 14.00 on a recent Wednesday afternoon. The scene: 25 or so people lined up in the hot July sun waiting for tickets to go on sale for the inaugural screening of an actual two-week Jerry Lewis film festival. Today’s movie is The Nutty Professor—or Docteur Jerry et Mister Love, as the 1963 film is known in France. A Jekyll-and-Hyde takeoff, it is widely regarded as among Lewis’s finest works as writer-director-star. The ticket queue is well behaved but palpably eager.
Whetting our appetite, a handbill for the retrospective quotes Robert Benayoun, film critic and director of the documentary *Bonjour Monsieur Lewis,*on The Nutty Professor: it is a work that “confirms” Lewis as “not only a corrosive satirist but . . . an audacious colorist, and a bold juggler of sonic effect.” A catalog, written by the film historian Emmanuel Droux, author of Le Cinema Burlesque, pokes fun at critics who cite this movie as the masterpiece in Lewis’s oeuvre—as if there were only one! That said, Droux notes that The Nutty Professor“remains a staggering film,” so much so that even Americans, despite their inexplicable aversion to Lewis, seem to appreciate it. That is true: Eddie Murphy remade the picture in 1996, successfully enough that a sequel followed in 2000, and a third has been threatened. In 2004 the original was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Register (though it is possible this was merely a harmless sop to French sensibilities at a low point in Franco-American relations).
The Parisians outside the theater are happy to share their own enthusiasm for Lewis’s work. I introduce myself to one elderly, stylish woman—unabashedly gray hair, nicely coifed—and explain in my infantile French that Americans are fascinated and amused by the French passion for Lewis and would she be so kind as to explain why this passion persists. “Pourquoi?” she asks with a shrug. “Pourquoi?” The question lingers in the air, rhetorically, philosophically, as if the answer were both obvious and beyond words.
A younger woman—silk scarf despite the heat—answers me in English. “Because he is funny,” she says with a smile and an infectious laugh. Bien sûr: That would be my answer, too, if I agreed with it.
A middle-aged man—cargo shorts, mandals—is eager to talk “Jerry.” He praises the director’s technical innovations, including his pioneering use of video playback; bemoans older prints of the films in which Lewis’s mewling nasal-isms were dubbed into French (“You miss the nuance—it would be like for you hearing Gérard Depardieu in English”); and speaks knowledgeably about even the more obscure corners of the filmmaker-star’s oeuvre, including *The Day the Clown Cried,*an unfinished and rarely seen Holocaust-circus drama. (I happen to be something of a Lewis scholar myself, and you can find my definitive account of the making of The Day the Clown Cried here, in Spy.)
The man turns to his wife, and in French, as best as I can make out, they discuss the perfection of a particular camera movement from The Ladies’ Man (1961), which is also on the festival program. “Jerry is one of the best directors of the 1960s,” the man then says to me in English, summing up, a hint of emotion in his voice. “I put him with Godard and Leone.”
The tickets finally go on sale, and we file into the theater. By the time the lights go down, the auditorium is a third to a half full, maybe 120 people; not a Cannes premiere, but not bad—even in a country with nearly 11 percent unemployment—for a Wednesday afternoon.
I have seen The Nutty Professor before and am not a fan, though sitting among this audience, in this city, I hope to discover whatever it is that has previously eluded me. I do like some of Lewis’s earlier comedies with Dean Martin—try Artists and Modelsor Hollywood or Bust, both directed by Frank Tashlin—but most of his work as a director and solo star I find . . . well, unfunny, I guess I’d have to say.
The humor continues to elude me this afternoon but no one else: the audience laughs appreciatively at even the corniest gags and most belabored slapstick, digging deeper now and then for scattered belly laughs and guffaws. One woman gasps “Non!” in pleasure-pain when the director telegraphs an impending pratfall involving barbells.
“How long is this movie?” my 14-year-old son asks.
I half-get the intellectual appeal: as a director, Lewis takes the kind of formal experiments Hitchcock loved and applies them to comedy. The Nutty Professor, for instance, has some nice bits involving exaggerated sounds as well as long silences. Lewis’s gags may not make you laugh, but you can unpack them—the ones that involve more than him crossing his eyes—the way you can unpack a Hitchcock camera move, a Godard edit, or the color of a Douglas Sirk set.
Speaking of which: this has been advertised as a restored version of *The Nutty Professor,*but the hues are wan and bleached out, lacking the acrylic, color-wheel pop I remember from previous viewing—and as my friend on line pointed out, with Lewis “everything is about the color.” A New York audience at Film Forum, say, or Lincoln Center, would be screaming at the projectionist and demanding refunds. But the Paris audience doesn’t seem to care. Bathing in genius, even improperly filtered genius, appears to be reward enough. Or maybe Jerry intended the hues to be wan? A reflection of the colorless, dehumanizing modern society that is the comedian-trickster's foil? Anyway, lights up. Applause.
