March 4, 2025 at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 35mm

“If Jerry Lewis had been working in 1917, he would have made genuine Marxist movies.” - Jean-Luc Godard

Related texts

The Big Mouth Strikes Again: A Dialogue on Mid-period Jerry Lewis by Chris Fujiwara and A.S. Hamrah

"The Big Mouth" from Le Monde de Jerry Lewis by Noël Simsolo

The Program

The Big Mouth

Dir. Jerry Lewis

1967. 107 min. 35mm.

In English.

In The Big Mouth, Jerry Lewis plays hapless accountant Gerald Clamson. While on a fishing trip in San Diego, he hooks a strange catch: a mortally wounded scuba diver who looks just like him. It all goes south from there as Jerry, donning various guises, gets mixed up with vicious mobsters in pursuit of stolen diamonds, entering a merry-go-round of mad men and doppelgängers. From this pretext of a scenario, Lewis the filmmaker mounts a rebellion against the dominant laws of cinema. With stasis, delay, and entropy as organizing principles, it’s a film made up of isolated units of gags liberated from dramatic continuity and identification, propelled only by the narcotic of the filmmaking apparatus, the bewitchment of image and sound, the hypnotism of matter.

“If we see The Big Mouth as a Vietnam movie, that makes it Lewis’s La chinoise or Made in U.S.A., just as it’s his Pierrot le fou and his Week-end.” - Chris Fujiwara

“At the end of the actor-director’s eighth feature, a man is born: his name is Jerry Lewis.” - Noël Simsolo

Special thanks to Jesse Trussell (BAM); Chris Fujiwara; A.S. Hamrah; Noël Simsolo; Nicholas Elliott.