Jerry Lewis: from Cinderfella to King of Comedy – a career in clips

Errand Boy

Silent-screen artistry did not die with the arrival of the talkies: it simply hid out, found a new home and survived on subsistence rations. The Errand Boy cast Jerry Lewis as a wheedling dolt who wreaks havoc at a Hollywood studio. Today it’s chiefly notable for this sublime piece of pantomime as its lowly hero fires up a cigar and proceeds to electrify an empty boardroom.

Pardners

“You and me, we’re gonna be partners. You and me, we’re gonna be pals,” sings Dean Martin to Jerry Lewis as the pair rattle around the woods, making camp and getting spooked by owls. The pair were indeed partners throughout a 17-film collaboration that installed them at the top of the US box office. But they were buddies only fitfully, as Martin increasingly bridled over his role as Lewis’s straight man. The alliance broke down irrevocably in the late 1950s.

Cinderfella

Lewis danced merrily on to solo success in films such as The Bellboy, The Nutty Professor and Cinderfella. Here he is in the latter, resplendent in Butlins coat and wide-hipped trousers, making a scene and cutting a dash as he arrives at the ball. The luminous Princess Charming (Anna Maria Alberghetti) looks on with inexplicable lust in her eyes.

The Day the Clown Cried

For the past four decades, The Day the Clown Cried has been the great Moby Dick of Hollywood folklore, the elusive monster in the vault. Lewis directed and starred in this tragicomedy about a down-on-his-luck prat-faller who entertains the kids at a Nazi death camp. Legend has it that horrified studio chiefs took one look at the rough cut and ordered that the film be buried for good. “None of your business,” Lewis snapped when he was asked whether it would ever see the light of day.

King of Comedy

Martin Scorsese’s pitch-black farce cast Lewis as Jerry Langford, a successful chat-show host who finds himself preyed on by Robert De Niro’s aspiring stand-up. Here, for once, it was Lewis playing the straight man. His brilliantly restrained, cold-blooded performance takes the viewer behind the velvet rope of the celebrity lifestyle, through the green rooms and studio lobbies, all the way to a sterile mansion beside the golf course.

1976 telethon (reunion with Dean Martin)

In the mid-1970s Jerry Lewis’s annual Labour Day telethon provided the perfect platform for a long-time-coming reunion with Dean Martin. Frank Sinatra plays peacemaker as Martin lollops on stage with a cigarette burning between his knuckles. “So, how ya been?” deadpans Lewis. Within seconds the pair are bantering and bickering as though they’ve never been apart.