Screen:

...That is what Lewis has made in Hardly Working...

...In the circus the clowns come on and cut up, then they disappear from view until it's time for them to come on again...

...In some of the more rough and tumble1 scenes, I even found myself looking closely to see whether Lewis hadn't used a double...

...With these long stretches where we have to take Lewis seriously as a pathetic failure who's trying to reform, it's hard to see the humor when he turns on the slapstick for a few minutes...

...Screen OUT OF ORDER FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMEN ARE WRONG ANY TIME I begin thinking that movies are an international language, like music, all I have to do to disabuse myself of the idea is remember the high esteem in which the French hold Jerry Lewis...

...In a movie, the characters cannot disappear...

...It's an incoherent and dopey version of Pagliacci...

...His life-long career as a clown lies in pieces...

...The sheer energy and abandon with which Lewis could throw himself into acting crazy - I remember a finale to a television special when he got so carried away with himself, he literally kicked the bandstand to pieces - was what made him irresistible, sometimes...

...Those moments when he goes flying across a room and crashing into a wall are supposed to be the whole point of this movie...

...When Lewis was younger, the "idiot'' was no doubt real, and a problem...

...I don't know, though...

...Only a few reels after the clown bit, there is an episode where a fellow mailman teases him for being a "clown" at work...

...IN A recent television interview I saw, Lewis bemoaned with mock seriousness the difficulty of being fifty-five years old and still having to be, as he put it,"the keeper of the idiot...

...They are also aided by the fact that at a comedy, a French intellectual does not actually want to be amused...

...It suggests that inside the day-to-day Jerry Lewis - the one, for instance, who has just come out of near bankruptcy and an addiction to pills - there is a ravening madcap, an impulsive, unpredictable fool who might break out of Lewis's personality at any moment and cause us all to die laughing...

...The only problem I have with their assessment is that when I actually go into a theater and watch his movies - including the new one, Hardly Working - I don't laugh...

...As Andrew Sarris once pointed out, they are greatly aided in this preference by the fact that they do not speak English...

...He combines the stoical loneliness of Chaplin or Keaton with the antic zaniness of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges...

...The film is a series of crash-bang vignettes, set-pieces, of the sort that clowns perform in between the other acts at a circus...

...As if that weren't enough to make us sympathetic, his brother-in-law turns out to be a boorish ogre who ridicules him for having been a clown...

...But I suspect that at fifty-five, when the keeper throws open the idiot's cage and stands back, nothing happens...

...He wants only to be bemused...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...One reason Hardly Working fails to be funny is that after over thirty years of making films, Lewis still doesn't realize that a film isn't a circus...

...Keaton and the Marx Brothers were funny in movies because they invented characters who could be on every minute, characters who were always the same, always funny, no matter what was happening...

...He has to seek solace in the friendship of his niece (all great clowns have instant relationships with children...

...What would be the sense of any of this if Lewis had to use a double to do such scenes...

...It's as if he's repaid a debt to society...

...Just after Lewis finishes his clown act, the circus goes out of business, a development which we in the movie audience should take as an omen...

...Having established himself, however ineptly, as a clown down on his luck, he then builds the rest of his film around the belief that it is a far, far greater thing to be a mailman...

...He does more than that, they feel...

...It's an interesting phrase, and no longer, I suspect, a very accurate one...

...Even on television and in the early movies, what succeeded was not so much talent as exuberance...

...Getting the idiot to come out at all must take a lot of coaxing these days...

...and there's nothing the French find more entertaining than a good historical dialectic...

...The camera follows them around relentlessly, poking into their private lives as well as their public performances...

...Maybe that's what all the pills were for in the ten years since Lewis's last film - to try to get the idiot on his feet again for one more performance...

...Having seen Lewis thus, in his proper socio-historical-cultural setting, the French realized long ago that he's unbearably funny...

...The French see Lewis as someone who carries on in the tradition of the great screen comics of the past...

...In the opening scene of Hardly Working, Lewis appears as a clown in a circus...

...It was to star in them that he made this film...

...Of course, the physical comedy of Tati's films is far less flamboyant and violent...

...But I guess not...

...In effect the slapstick just becomes further evidence of what a screw-up this guy is...

...Lewis has to move in with relatives and get a job as a mailman...

...Lewis has to have been the kind of kid who was treated as an idiot by all the other kids, until he discovered that if only he pulled out all the stops and got the others laughing, his innate goofiness became a social asset instead of a liability...

...In his films of the fifties and sixties, the silent comedy of the twenties is synthesized with the best sound comedy of the thirties...

...but that's because, as all Frenchmen know, even the most severe Marxists, France is a far more civilized and advanced country...

...They see in Lewis someone who puts the gaff to modern America the same way that Jacques Tati puts it to France...

...If, instead of this, a character is on for five minutes and then turns into somebody else, a private, different person, until it's time for the next slapstick routine, the result is not a comedy at all...

...Hardly Working is enough to make me wonder if this isn't the case, anyway...

...Lewis's attention span must be rather short, even in his own movies...

...He becomes quite incensed and lectures the fellow on how his high performance with the mails proves he's not a clown any more...

...It doesn't require a slapstick drubbing of the same magnitude...

...It's an appropriate overture, for the comedy of the rest of the film is, as in Lewis's past films, very much that of the clown act...