It's no wonder that the film's reputation grew over the years......considered as Lewis's "Citizen Kane", his "Vertigo", his most personal statement and the epitome of his art.......
In the film's final scenes, the gentle hearted , clownish Kelp and the odious Buddy battle for control of the body they both inhabit, a bravura piece of acting from Lewis. ...
But away from the movie, you could watch a punishing marathon version of the same battle during Labor Day weekend's Muscular Dystrophy telethon. While hosting this event, Lewis tirelessly veered back and forth from his two alter egos, the rubbery, preening joker and the smug, supremely self-satisfied show biz hipster, barely repressing his hard shelled contempt......as this personality struggle dragged on for close to 72 hours, it began to look like a psychiatric version of "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", a uniquely American spectacle.....
Ultimately, the slings, arrows and outrageous fortune that Lewis endured throughout his long career helped Buddy Love triumph as Lewis's public personality and owner of his soul. The collapse of his legendary, unseen "The Day The Clown Cried" became a permanent open wound.........and his subsequent films that did see the light of day were judged unwatchable....
And so Lewis aged into Buddy Love for real......coated with the emotional scar tissue of a hard scrabble show business life and yet possessed of a fragile, easily damaged ego and a thin skin rivaled only by Donald Trump's. Lewis frequently used this persona to terrorize and humiliate would-be interviewers.....and he and Martin Scorsese employed it to great effect in "The King Of Comedy"
The community of culture mavens mocked and reviled the French for celebrating Lewis as a film auteur. But in truth, the French film community was perfectly justified in their assessment......as a director, Lewis exerted total creative control of his movies,.....regardless of what you thought of the work, he crafted his films with as much artistic micro-management as Truffaut, Godard or Hitchcock......(technically, he broke new ground, the first director to employ video playback on his sets....you now have an entire generation of directors who never look up from their video monitors while they're shooting.......whether that's a good thing is a subject for another post....)
If Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman always had Paris......then we'll always have "The Nutty Professor" as Jerry Lewis's shining achievement. When Buddy Love bullies a bartender into behaving courteously ("Repeat after me......say, 'What'll it beeeeeeee?") you can hear Jerry Lewis asking us the same 'What'll it beeeeee'......and choose between Kelp and Buddy. For the film's 1963 dictated happy ending, he chose the sweet Prof. Kelp....for that, we'll always give 4 stars (****)....in life, for better or worse......he chose Buddy.
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