Guardian: Oscar watch: Jerry Lewis is long overdue an Academy Award

[WI_DEM]

On 22 February, Jerry Lewis is to receive a special Oscar for his charitable work. It's a pity that he's yet to receive one for his contribution to cinema

Genius ... Jerry Lewis in Who's Minding the Store? Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Last year on this site, Xan Brooks started a trivia game of incongruous double bills inspired by the Archbishop of Canterbury's two favourite films, Andrei Rublev and The Muppet Christmas Carol. May I suggest another game: pairings of films that seem mismatched initially but actually have much in common? For example Jerry Lewis's The Ladies' Man (1961) and Jean-Luc Godard's Tout Va Bien (1972).

Tout Va Bien, about striking factory workers holding their bosses hostage, has a composite set influenced by Lewis's The Ladies Man. In both films, the characters are locked in a confined locus which, as the critic Chris Fujiwara suggests, writing on the Lewis picture, "lets us know explicitly that this is a fantasy space, a movie set, a space of transformation."

Was Godard so off-target when he made his hyperbolic remark in 1967 that "Lewis is the only one in Hollywood doing something different – the only one who's making courageous films. He's been able to do it because of his personal genius"? Certainly, Lewis's films were radical departures from the other comedies of the day, especially in their free-form episodic structure, surrealist sensibility and metafilmic devices.

Here's another pairing. Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1963) with Bernardo Bertolucci's Partner (1968). In The Nutty Professor, a shy, nerdish professor, who has no luck with women, creates a potion that transforms him into Buddy Love, a cool dude, attractive to women. (Is it Jerry Lewis becoming Dean Martin or revealing his true persona?) Partner involves a confused and shy young man who creates a more confident double. Both stories were updated versions of 19th century novels, the former based on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the latter on Dostoevsky's The Double. (One could also recall that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made a film called Pardners in 1956, and that the alter ego is prominent in Lewis's oeuvre as well as in some of Bertolucci's films.) There is little doubt in my mind that the two Lewis movies are superior to the Bertolucci and Godard ones.

In 2003, in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, there is a discussion on films between the French and American boys. At one point, the Frenchman says, "You Americans don't understand your own culture. No wonder you never got the point of Jerry Lewis." The American replies, "Don't even get me started on Jerry Lewis." This exchange crystallises the dichotomy that is supposed to exist between the attitudes of anglophones and francophones towards Jerry Lewis: American no-bullshit pragmatism v pretentious French theorising, or American philistinism v French enlightenment.

In 2006, Lewis was presented with the Legion d'Honneur in France on his 80h birthday. But, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "Lewis's popularity in America is far greater than any French love of Lewis ... American denial of the American love of Jerry Lewis is pathological." In a way, Lewis receiving the Jean Hersholt award at the Oscars could be seen as a back-handed compliment rather than an honour.

It suggests that Lewis, who has never been even nominated for an Academy Award, is being recognised for his annual telethons rather than for the films that made him famous enough to do them in the first place


http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/feb/10/jerry-lewis-film-auteur