The ladies man

Only the film maker who gives himself entirely, also on the film emulsion, is a complete film-maker. According to actor-director Jerry Lewis whose film, against according to the maker, then works as a mirror: ‘What he gives, he gets back’.Jonathan Rosenbaum once remarked that Lewis was the director who had the idea of installing a video monitor on the set. He did that first while shooting The Ladies’ Man. It made it possible for him to see at once his own acting and its surroundings from the standpoint of the director.The film is set in a backdrop, admired unanimously by the critics, of four floors: the girls’ boarding school where Lewis worked as odd-job man. The immense set, constructed entirely in the studio, was open on one side to enable striking pans. Lewis’ role as odd-job man and the set form the ingredients of the comedy in which Lewis left no stone unturned to spread his comic talents.The radicalism of Lewis’ humour and his qualities as film-maker have always been underestimated by the critics, certainly in his own country. He has been included in the Cinema Narcissus programme to stress that he is more than the popular comic about whom the joke circulates in the US that he his only taken seriously by a critic and a half in Paris.