Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man certainly lives up to its
reputation for innovative design and technical elements, embodied in the early single-take
scene in which Lewis’ character Herbert wanders through the seemingly empty
house in which he’s just been employed as a handyman, the frame taking in the
large central lobby and staircases rising therefrom, three floors of bedrooms
on either side, and unseen to him, in the bottom right corner of the frame, a
dining room crammed with young women, the very thing that Herbert
had pledged to avoid. The movie’s main premise, that the women collaborate in
keeping him busy to avoid him from leaving, strangely fails to land though, in
part because Lewis, in typical style, plays Herbert in good and bad times alike
as barely functional and always on the edge of becoming demented; it follow
that the movie lacks any kind of sexual charge, the women barely registering as
individuals (both as director and in character, Lewis seems more comfortable
with the two older members of the set-up, a former opera singer who
provides a home for aspiring performers, and a motherly housekeeper). The film
amply illustrates the bizarre duality of Lewis’ creative sensibility: on the
one hand engaging with relish with the then novel notion of live TV broadcasts
and the attendant chaos, and luxuriating in spatial possibilities (extended
further by the fact of one door which appears to open onto a world of pure
imagination); on the other hand aggressively assaulting the viewer with his
unbound narcissism and excruciating mugging. The aggregate effect is as
troubling as it is funny, which of course amounts to a recommendation,
supplemented by an all-time-great opening title sequence, and a weirdly affecting
cameo by comedian Buddy Lester, his tough-guy character reduced to blubbering
mush within minutes of encountering Herbert, in its way the movie’s most
pointed illustration of the near-extortionate subtext to Lewis’ antics.
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