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The Camusian query is at once confronted, the noose out of the business valise brings down the house but leaves the suicidal protagonist alive to blunder another day. (The abstraction is again picked up later at the edge of the abyss, he has gasoline all over himself but no match, howling wind scores the defeated, wet retreat.) Jerry Lewis ("Who else?") and the human condition, distilled to slipping and sliding across a glossy office floor. (One stands erect only to be engulfed by modernist furniture, cf. Tati's Mon Oncle.) Misfitdom, a state reaching beyond childhood and back to the French ancestor with the fleur-de-lis outhouse. The psychiatrist (Herb Edelman) has it diagnosed, "the overcompensation of the id against narcissist feedback chromosomes," the extended therapy has many divagations. Lewis' limpid schwanengesang is a return to The Bellboy, the blackout-skit structure at its freest and most severe. The "Stop Smoking or Else" treatment has the patient clocked by Dick Butkus whenever a cigarette is lit, vertigo meanwhile is cured with a cameo from King Kong. Gainsborough and Rodin at the museum, appropriately modulated into animation two decades later in Joe Dante's Looney Tunes masterpiece. Up in the air with Jolly Fats Weehawkin's Airline, a splendid sequence that has the auteur beating Zucker-Abraham-Zucker at their own game, then down at the restaurant with Zane Buzby's sublimely droning waitress. Refractions everywhere—the showboating bank robber and the Southern-fried patrolman and the sagacious fakir buried under an avalanche. "Isn't one of you enough?" A twilight Smorgasbord, the serene culmination of Lewis' cinematic language. The beautiful capper is just a reversal of the cosmic order, the universe turns to chaos as man at last reaches enlightenment. With Bill Richmond, Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., Foster Brooks, Francine York, Donna Ponterotto, and Buddy Lester.
--- Fernando F. Croce |