To me the films of Jerry Lewis are guilty cinematic pleasures up ( or should that be down? ) there along with the 'Airport' disaster movies, Britain's 'Confessions Of' series, and the Dean Martin 'Matt Helm' pictures.
Whenever one aired on U.K. television in the '70's, it was like a Royal Wedding, 'Live Aid' and 'Concert For Diana' all rolled into one. There was no simply no way I was going to miss a Jerry Lewis movie.
He basically played the same character over and over again - the gormless goof-ball, a child inhabiting a man's body, 'Forrest Gump' meets 'Inspector Clouseau' - and that's why we loved him.
In 'The Disorderly Orderly', he is Jerome Littlefield, an accident-prone orderly at a private hospital. If anything can go wrong, when he's around it will. Ask him to fix a television set and he will break it beyond repair. Tell him to brush someone's teeth and he won't bother to check to see whether the patient actually has them in his mouth. If he smashes a bottle of pills, nurses will step on them and go flying like skittles.
As one would expect from a Frank Tashlin film, its full of inventive sight gags, and Lewis performs them in his own wonderful, crazy way. The climax in which he chases a patient rolling down a steep hill on a gurney will have you goggling in disbelief even now. No C.G.I. in those days, folks! Incredible stuff.
Not so hot is the romantic subplot in which Lewis comes to the aid of would-be suicide patient Susan Oliver. Like Chaplin before him, Lewis combined comedy and pathos, but not so successfully. One of the great things about D.V.D. is that one can fast forward the soppy stuff to get to the really good bits ( of which there are many ).
We are far away from the '60's to have reached the point where movies such as this now represent nostalgia. Yet 'The Disorderly Orderly' does not depict the world as it was, but as it should have been, a land where women wore Edith Head clothes, everything looked colourful and shiny, no-one swore or did terrible things and even idiots like Jerome got the girl at the end.
Lewis had burned himself out by the late '60's, but when ablaze he was a comedy supernova.
Whenever one aired on U.K. television in the '70's, it was like a Royal Wedding, 'Live Aid' and 'Concert For Diana' all rolled into one. There was no simply no way I was going to miss a Jerry Lewis movie.
He basically played the same character over and over again - the gormless goof-ball, a child inhabiting a man's body, 'Forrest Gump' meets 'Inspector Clouseau' - and that's why we loved him.
In 'The Disorderly Orderly', he is Jerome Littlefield, an accident-prone orderly at a private hospital. If anything can go wrong, when he's around it will. Ask him to fix a television set and he will break it beyond repair. Tell him to brush someone's teeth and he won't bother to check to see whether the patient actually has them in his mouth. If he smashes a bottle of pills, nurses will step on them and go flying like skittles.
As one would expect from a Frank Tashlin film, its full of inventive sight gags, and Lewis performs them in his own wonderful, crazy way. The climax in which he chases a patient rolling down a steep hill on a gurney will have you goggling in disbelief even now. No C.G.I. in those days, folks! Incredible stuff.
Not so hot is the romantic subplot in which Lewis comes to the aid of would-be suicide patient Susan Oliver. Like Chaplin before him, Lewis combined comedy and pathos, but not so successfully. One of the great things about D.V.D. is that one can fast forward the soppy stuff to get to the really good bits ( of which there are many ).
We are far away from the '60's to have reached the point where movies such as this now represent nostalgia. Yet 'The Disorderly Orderly' does not depict the world as it was, but as it should have been, a land where women wore Edith Head clothes, everything looked colourful and shiny, no-one swore or did terrible things and even idiots like Jerome got the girl at the end.
Lewis had burned himself out by the late '60's, but when ablaze he was a comedy supernova.