By rights, Martin and Lewis should have the kind of cultural footprint renders them permanent household names: the status that turns artists into Halloween costumes, as archetypal as cartoon characters and ancient gods. For ten years, from 1946 to 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were a double act, and accurately describing how popular they were sounds like gross exaggeration. They were so big that the only fitting comparisons are to rock stars—and not just any rock stars, but Elvis Presley, or The Beatles. “For ten years after World War II, Dean and I were not only the most successful show-business act in history,” Jerry Lewis wrote with his trademark humility in Dean and Me: A Love Story (1984), “—we were history.” Their live shows were pandemonium. They reportedly made eleven million dollars in 1951 alone. Their movies were box office smashes (despite lukewarm reviews). No less an authority than Orson Welles said they were so funny that you “would piss your pants.”
Martin and Lewis have never been erased from cultural history, but they have been minimized: evaded, elided, downplayed. I was well into adulthood when I even learned that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had spent a decade as a double act. Their separate images—Dean Martin, Rat Packer, king of cool, and Jerry Lewis, doing wacky slapstick in The Bellboy (1960) or The Nutty Professor (1963)—seem to have endured in cultural memory much more than their work together. Maybe that’s because the willingness to go back and watch old episodes of The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950–55) would be extremely niche even if the media conglomerates cared about the preservation and accessibility of 1950s TV, not to mention 1940s radio. Maybe it’s because their true brilliance was in live—often improvised—performance, and so only shadows of their greatness remain. Their films were and are often viewed as pretty haphazard affairs, cashing in on a hot thing, not unlike Elvis’s movies in the decade that followed. (Martin and Lewis’s movies share a producer with Elvis’s—Hal B. Wallis—and sometimes directors, too, particularly Norman Taurog.) But the extraordinary thing is that, even if the films are just slapdash and shadows, Martin and Lewis were so great that their films are great films anyway. Their brilliance shines through the weakest material: the ineffable, bewitching something between them—an intimacy, an immediacy, an ingenuity—frozen in amber for those of us who would never see it in the Copacabana.
After exclusively thinking about Martin and Lewis for many months, I wrote a primer on them for MUBI Notebook. Read the whole thing here.
The Sundae 