The Big Mouth Strikes Again
A Dialogue on Mid-Period Jerry Lewis
by Chris Fujiwara & A.S. Hamrah
This conversation was commissioned for a screening of Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth at Brooklyn Academy of Music on March 4, 2025, presented by The Theater of the Matters.
Chris Fujiwara has written and edited several books on cinema, including Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall; The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger; and Jerry Lewis. Formerly Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival, he has curated film programs for other institutions.
A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for n+1 and the author of the book The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018.
1. If You’re Going to San Diego...
A.S. Hamrah: The Big Mouth evidently opened the same day the Newark race riots began, Wednesday, July 12, 1967. Jerry’s trajectory from his birth and childhood in Newark to making this movie in San Diego at Sea World is interesting in a unique 20th century American and Jewish way. Jerry could be a character in a Philip Roth novel, a middle-aged Jewish man (he turned 41 that year) and a huge success in Hollywood, frolicking at a water park in San Diego as his hometown burns in a riot and briefly becomes the focal point of the Civil Rights struggle in America. As in a Roth novel, in this movie he uses his own first name, or a variation on it, for the character he plays, perhaps “Gerry” instead of Jerry, or Gerald instead of Jerome, as he often called himself. Jerome was the name on his birth certificate, though he also often said his real name was Joseph.
Chris Fujiwara: Not that this invalidates your point, but, though IMDb and other Internet sources give July 12 as the release date, the public premiere was on June 21 in St. Louis. July 12 was the date the film opened in New York and Los Angeles. It’s symptomatic of Lewis’s relationship with the U.S. press that he (I think we can assume the decision was at least partly his and not just Columbia’s) chose not only to open the film in St. Louis three weeks before it reached the two bigger cities, but also not to press-screen it: Kevin Thomas in his Los Angeles Times review and Howard Thompson in his New York Times review both mention that they saw the film at public screenings.
June 21 was the summer solstice and the official beginning, if there was one, of the “Summer of Love.” The Big Mouth seems timed to begin Jerry’s own Summer of Love. The choice to shoot the film substantially on location in San Diego is, for Lewis, a statement equivalent to Ken Kesey’s mantra, “outside is inside, how does it look?”
ASH: Like other showbiz figures we associate with Jerry Lewis and his milieu, primarily Frank Sinatra, at this point Jerry is poised uncomfortably between a slick version of 1950s and early 1960s entertaiment, which was always in tension with his style of comedy, and a new world of youth culture, hippies, and acid-dropping West Coast rock music; much of his former audience had grown up into that.
CF: Harry Betts’s score for The Big Mouth is in the kind of sophisticated and splashy big-band idiom that evokes the cultural experience, and a certain cultural attitude, that belonged to the generation, Jerry’s, that came of age during or shortly after WW2. In terms of the generational divide Jerry was dealing with at the time—his own physical aging alongside the perception that his films mainly appealed to a very young audience—the music defines him, and the film, as “adult,” though Betts switches to an ersatz rock style during the Sea World chase sequence.
ASH: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had just come out and the Monterey Pop Festival was held earlier that week. This is the world The Big Mouth emerged into. It’s hard to believe it’s the same world. Everybody went to San Francisco, Jerry Lewis went to San Diego.
CF: When he hosted the Hullabaloo TV show on September 20, 1965, Jerry introduced Barry McGuire singing “Eve of Destruction,” which was Billboard’s Number One song that week. Introducing the song, Lewis says: “This song is something special. It has an awful lot of important things to say about how we grown-ups are running the world.” It’s a scripted intro that he’s reading from cue cards, but it hints at Lewis’s politics during the period and how they may have informed, if at a subterranean level, The Big Mouth. In 1969, Lewis made a crack on the Tonight Show about being glad to have had the chance to use the toilet on a plane while it was flying over Mississippi. That caused a Southern theater chain to cancel bookings of the initial run of Hook, Line and Sinker. “Eve of Destruction,” by the way, contains the Lewisian couplet: “When human respect is disintegratin’ / This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’.”
2. Clamson’s Holiday
CF: Like Playtime (also 1967), The Big Mouth is a holiday film. Whereas Tati builds a simulacrum of the world, a huge studio set, Lewis goes into the real world, which is already a simulacrum.
The chase at the end of The Big Mouth has people running around in circles, which reminds me of all the circles in Playtime, such as the drunk following the overhead light and going into the restaurant. The narrative of The Big Mouth is circular, as are those of The Errand Boy (1962) and The Patsy (1964).
ASH: The Hilton hotel where much of the film’s action is set has a circular driveway and it’s introduced during a traffic jam Jerry has to get out of. Yet unlike in Playtime, Jerry does not make the same kind of extensive use of the hotel, nor of Sea World, that Tati makes of his sets in his comedy. When Jerry and Suzie (Susan Bay) first go to Sea World, the setting is introduced in a long pan and tracking shot that seems to be setting up the location for some kind of fun.
But that quickly becomes a short montage of things the two see there, a perfunctory use of the location not up to Lewis’s usual standard of spatial investigation of sets and locations, like in The Bellboy, his first film as a director-writer-star, from 1960. Both the Hilton and Sea World seem to be settings used for financial considerations, to get something back from the location in the production budget. They are product placements, but kind of pleasant or banal ones.
CF: Well, yes (and there’s also Gerald Clamson’s Pepsi-Cola cooler box), though that also means that Jerry is positioned very differently from Tati. The Big Mouth is so clear about where it is in culture and its own conditions of production. It didn’t need to be Sea World, or any real-world place; the same plot could have been done entirely in the studio and on the backlot, and then the film would have looked very much like the sort of routine crime movie it’s parodying. It’s because it’s Sea World, and the Hilton Inn (which Jerry and Lyle Wheeler were then at great pains to copy, or reimagine, really, in the studio), that The Big Mouth takes part in this vivid and intense push-pull relationship with the world outside Hollywood.
ASH: Were these scenes made with the park attendees at Sea World aware a film was being shot? Or with a hidden camera so they didn’t know? It’s hard to tell. This is part of what makes The Big Mouth Lewis’s most abstract but also most “realistic” movie.
CF: Some of the shots of him and Susan Bay visiting Sea World do have sort of a stolen look, as you suggest, but Kevin Thomas, who visited when they were shooting the scene of Clamson and Bambi (Jeannine Riley) at Sea World, commented on how meticulously Lewis set up everything.
3. Columbia Trilogy
ASH: The Big Mouth, made for Columbia, shows Jerry grappling with the legacy, or the techniques, themes, and tropes, of his Paramount films. The film is a throwback to those movies, the last of which was The Family Jewels, in 1965. Jerry, once known as “the man who saved Paramount,” left the studio as film production began to shrink at the studios during a time when they were declining in relevance. After the explicit appeal to psychology in Three on a Couch (1966), his first Columbia movie under his new contract with a new studio, in which his love interest played by Janet Leigh is a psychiatrist who he tries to help by taking on the problems of several of her patients, The Big Mouth plays out as some kind of post-therapy grappling with his previous work at a place he was more at home, Paramount.
CF: If we add Hook, Line and Sinker, we have a Lewis Columbia trilogy on mainstream consumer society, whereas the Paramount films had mostly taken place in worlds sequestered from the mainstream. All three films have contemporary trappings and cultural references, a kind of “adult” cultural awareness, even if somewhat veiled, which is less true of the Paramount films. Paramount could be seen as a childhood home from which Lewis gets expelled into the real world (Columbia; then on to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts and independent filmmaking). The location filming of Big Mouth makes it, among these films, the most immersed in the real social space of the films’ audience.
ASH: As in The Family Jewels, here Jerry again shows his reliance on the Julius Kelp character he had created for The Nutty Professor (1963). It seems that when Jerry as a screenwriter and performer senses he is in trouble (and he said that “comedy is a man in trouble”), he uses Kelp as a crutch, like he’s calling out, “Kelp, I need somebody!”
CF: Jerry performed the Lennon-McCartney song “Help!” in a (lamentably under-rehearsed) duet with his son Gary on that 1965 Hullabaloo show.
Clamson’s transformation into the Kelp figure is the inversion of the transformation in The Nutty Professor: in Nutty, the baseline Jerry, Kelp, who is somewhat grotesque but lovable, changes into the morally grotesque but attractive Buddy Love; in The Big Mouth, the baseline Jerry is normal-looking and is able to attract Suzie, but he transforms into a Kelp who is not only physically grotesque but is also obnoxious and self-absorbed.
It’s not explained how Clamson, whose job is probably not highly paid, can afford to stay in what appears to be a luxurious suite at what at the time was probably a somewhat upscale hotel. Wealth seems to belong, as an inherent attribute, to the magical Kelp persona. The idea that money doesn’t matter, that it can just come to someone magically, is explicit in the lyrics of “We’ve Got a World That Swings” (Nutty Professor); it also underlies the plot of Hook, Line and Sinker.
ASH: And then there is Sid Valentine, a really degraded Buddy Love-esque double, a version of Jerry’s gangster character from The Family Jewels.
In The Big Mouth we also see the Lewisian disintegration of character and personality into multiples, as in The Family Jewels and Three on a Couch, but these possible variants are only referred to, not seen, as Sid’s various aliases, one or two of which are women. We never see these, unlike “Heather” in Three on a Couch.
CF: There’s a bizarre insert of a black-and-white still of Jerry as Valentine, and weirdly enough he’s doubled: he’s both in the background, holding a gun, and matted in closeup in the foreground, looking at the camera.
4. The Money
ASH: At the bank where Jerry works as an auditor, there’s a sign with the bank’s name on the wall: WEAK NATIONAL BANK.
CF: “Weak National Bank” strikes me as something that probably came from co-screenwriter Bill Richmond. That sign on the wall is like the sort of background throwaway joke that would be in a MAD comic by Will Elder; whether you think it’s funny or not, whether you even notice it, doesn’t really matter in terms of the narrative information that the image is conveying. This sort of humor, which is verbal, linguistic, and which is also very flat, just put up there as a sign, and which isn’t even a joke, but more of an amused and dismissive gesture, this seems to me to reflect Bill Richmond.
It’s also Jerry’s way of acknowledging his own situation: he is a director-producer who is also a popular star, and yet, for all his power, he is someone who is working for a bank. When he left Paramount he was thrust into this era of film financing where the banks’ control was less disguised, he no longer had the layer of protection from them that his relationship with Paramount had provided. So he’s saying, with realism and with contempt, yes, I work for your bank, and your bank is weak.
5. Hatred of Jerry
CF: The Big Mouth is all about the different ways Lewis tries to respond to the hostility in the world outside. Eventually he tries to crouch and shrink and pretend not to be there. Again, he brings everything back to his real situation, the fact that he represents a problem in American culture, whose guardians see him as sort of an embarrassment.
ASH: There is a pronounced will to self-destruction in The Big Mouth more violent than in Jerry’s previous films. He is strafed with machine guns and bombed with a torpedo. Later he’s threatened with being boiled alive, after we have already seen another man boiled alive (George Takei, of all people). But Jerry keeps surviving, and other personas of his keep surviving. Yet Lewis and Bill Richmond, in this screenplay, have upped the stakes. There is more violence than usual in a Lewis film; it is still cartoonish, but it is presented here as deadlier.
CF: Thor, the gangster played by Harold J. Stone, wants to make sure Valentine is completely dead, this is perhaps the real thing that obsesses him: the diamonds the gangsters want are a metaphor for the dead body of Lewis.
Through the hostility of Thor and the hotel manager, Hodges (Del Moore), Jerry is caricaturing and commenting on the hostility he endured throughout his career in the reception of his work by the U.S. press.
ASH: The hostility is directed as usual at himself, but in this movie it does reflect a larger awareness of how it has also always been aimed at him from outside, even more so than in The Patsy, with its contemptuous showbiz professionals forcing his failure as a comedian. While in the end Jerry triumphs there, here it shows a certain awareness of obsolescence, and a real desire to torpedo his former self and emerge as somebody else, both as a performer and director. The next two films he made he didn’t direct, and the one after those, One More Time (1970), he isn’t in.
As a performer and a personality, Jerry kind of runs in parallel to John Wayne at this time, who became increasingly hated, among an audience reaching maturity, for his right-wing politics but perhaps also because they had loved him and believed in him as kids. And Wayne’s films were becoming increasingly uncomedic comedies, and then he turned to directing himself and made The Green Berets, his reactionary Vietnam war movie, a kind of parallel to Jerry’s own war movie, Which Way to the Front? (1970), a World War II comedy about assassinating Hitler, his semi-radicalized last stop before the The Day the Clown Cried.
There is also a hostility to actual jokes in the film. The scene of the cops arguing about which numbers represent which infractions, and in which Jerry slowly disappears as more cops show up, is like the joke about the Comedian’s Convention during which the assembled comics have assigned numbers to every joke and then instead of telling the jokes they just shout the numbers and everybody laughs. The scene just becomes a bunch of authority figures yelling out numerals.
CF: This scene is the point at which it becomes clear that the film is not really about the plot that the preceding scenes have set up. The plot gets pulled over to the side of the road, and what transpires is an exercise in formalism. Similarly with the business of taking the gangsters’ guns away, then giving them back, it’s a purely formal representation of shifts in the power balance among the characters. Then, with the convergence of all the characters at Sea World, we watch the unfolding of a sort of structural inevitability.
6. Normalization
ASH: San Diego and the Hilton Inn and Sea World are a big comedown from the locations in other Lewis films, like the Fountainebleu Hotel in Miami in The Bellboy. This is part of the normalizing effect the film has. It shows a desire to move on, into a more normal world, but also an inability to quite get there. As you mention, the hotel interiors are sets recreating the Hilton on a soundstage, unlike in The Bellboy. There was more freedom in that, his first film.
CF: The bellboy character, Harold, played by William Wellman Jr., is an inversion of Stanley in The Bellboy. Whereas in The Bellboy nobody ever asks Stanley about his thoughts and perceptions, the bellboy of 1966/67 isn’t interested in Clamson’s preoccupations: when Clamson-as-Kelp starts to launch into one of his lengthy speeches, Harold interrupts him so that he can leave.
ASH: Jerry has displaced his former role onto an actor who isn’t funny and not much of an actor.
CF: As to what you said about trying to move to a normal world, the moment that epitomizes that for me is that really lovely shot from inside the hotel lobby of Jerry and Suzie walking with her packages. Harry Betts scores this shot with its own theme, heard (I believe) nowhere else in the movie, a theme that’s in the style of Count Basie charts like “Li’l Darlin’,” thus linking back to the Basie interludes in Cinderfella (1960) and The Errand Boy. All these moments have a utopian quality, but only in this shot in The Big Mouth does Lewis place the utopia in the everyday world.
ASH: It’s interesting that Frank De Vol (the on-screen narrator) was a well-known composer of film scores, and a music arranger and bandleader of that same era, who ended up playing a comedy version of such a figure on the TV show Fernwood 2 Night in the 1970s, which was created by one of Jerry’s ex-TV writers, Norman Lear.
CF: When Lewis tries to be an adult, he kind of erases things that are distinctive about his persona. Something similar happened in Three on a Couch, and, to a degree at least, with the chauffeur character in The Family Jewels. Clamson is initially defined only by his job (counting other people’s money), his hobby (fishing), and his rule of not swearing (how to understand this . . . perhaps as an allusion to Jerry’s ambivalence about assuming a more mature persona after Family Jewels?). The encounter with Valentine gives him a mission, a narrative, and also causes him to divide into different characters.
The most normal-seeming person in the film is Suzie. No other character in the film is even remotely “normal,” except Bambi, come to think of it: so normality is gendered in the film? Suzie is also, I think, the only major character who is not made to freeze by the narrator’s interventions; this happens even to Clamson, in his Kelp disguise. Of all the characters, she is the most free of the narrative. Her concerns are real-worldly.
ASH: Yes, she brings up Sea World, taking it at face value: “Oh, it’s a fun place. It’s an amusement park and you can see animals.” This is the opposite of Janet Leigh’s psychiatrist in Three on a Couch, who says to her female zoologist patient, “You’ll never raise a family in an animal compound.”
CF: Then again, how normal is Suzie? She’s unable to understand what Jerry says to her because she insists on interpreting everything in terms of sex.
ASH: The blonde Jeannine Riley and brunette Susan Bay in The Big Mouth represent a mother/whore dichotomy that also recalls Jerry’s Paramount period. Riley is like Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor, a woman who’s got his number; Bay is like Ina Balin in The Patsy, a nice girl who wants what’s best for him. The innuendo-laden dialogue scene with Bay is one of the oddest and most revealing scenes in Jerry’s work. The subsequent Jerry-Suzie scenes continue that. Jerry’s talk of “frustration” is so insistent, the whole thing becomes a veiled discussion of his sexual problems, or of his struggle to move into adulthood.
CF: Suzie also completely falls for the fake FBI man’s story, which, based on her retelling of what he tells her, seems even more implausible than what we heard him tell Clamson earlier. Her desire to believe him suggests something deeply weird in Suzie’s normality, her longing for an authority figure.
ASH: Authority figures and tough guys in The Big Mouth are all revealed as crazy or go crazy in the film. Why should their criminal scheme, that Clamson has stumbled upon accidentally—or it’s thrust upon him by his double, Sid—why should that be expected to make any sense? The idea that the diamonds are hidden inside fake pearls is especially nonsensical. Or it indicates how subversive Hollywood films are made by certain auteurs: real gems hidden inside costume jewelry.
7. Kentucky Fried Chicken of the Sea
ASH: Colonel Sanders appears in The Big Mouth as himself. He’s a hotel guest competing with Jerry for the attention of the registration desk manager, Hodges. But his real-life status as the figurehead of his fast-food fried-chicken chain doesn’t come up. He’s there more as another authority figure yelling at people. It's an alarming coincidence that Colonel Sanders was also in gore and exploitation filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blast-Off Girls later the same year. The two Lewises are bizarrely linked by this brand icon as well as by their last names, and their status as outsider American auteurs.
CF: I have a lot of respect for Colonel Sanders’s choice of film projects. They position him, though it seems so unlikely, as an outsider figure in American culture.
ASH: Sanders is used in a more “normal” fashion in Blast-Off Girls, in which he hands out fried chicken to the rock band in the film. In The Big Mouth, Sanders is another half-used product placement, like the Hilton Inn and Sea World, barely acknowledged and semi-abandoned by the film. Then part of the action in The Big Mouth takes place in the Chicken of the Sea Theatre at Sea World. That’s where the kabuki theater scenes are set.
Is it odd for a tuna brand to sponsor a theater at an aquatic park that exploits animals? The orcas are celebrated, used as performers, but tuna are turned into consumer food products. It reminds me of the Phil Silvers Charlie the Tuna animated TV commercials for StarKist Tuna from that same time. Silvers’s Charlie is the spokesman, he’s also a tuna fish, which is the product killed, canned, sold, and eaten.
I think Jerry’s old mentor would’ve done more with Sea World. I’d like to think that if Frank Tashlin, a former cartoonist who wrote books about bears and possums as stand-ins for atomic-age humanity, had made this movie with Jerry Lewis, the sea creatures at Sea World would have been more prominent in the film and would’ve somehow gotten liberated and returned to the ocean like Clamson and Sid and the rest of the cast at the end of the movie. The Big Mouth really is the last gasp of Tashlin in Lewis’s work—the stretched legs gag seems out of place here and wouldn’t have in one of the films they made together.
CF: Fair enough, though there’s one Tashlinian shot that works really well for me: the closeup in which Hodges’s face is bifurcated vertically by being reflected in the polished wood surface of his workstation at the front desk.
ASH: I took a screenshot of that!
CF: It recalls the scene of Eddie Mayehoff looking at Jerry through the water cooler, which distorts both their faces, in Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955). The decor of the modern world offers new possibilities for people to become grotesque caricatures of themselves. With the stretched legs shot, I think Lewis wanted to keep building on the idea, which both he and Tashlin had been working with, that something about his persona causes the laws of nature to become suspended. This happens again when “Kelp” launches himself off the tennis net. The idea that the Lewis persona has magical affinities and powers is a big part of Lewis’s work. I still question how completely it was eliminated from The Day the Clown Cried.
8. Absences
ASH: The scene where the gangsters and Jeannine Riley’s Bambi discuss things in the lounge on the yacht is one of the strangest scenes in Jerry’s career. It’s done in one shot with a series of complicated camera moves and reframings that are really striking. And Jerry/Clamson is not even in the scene. The scenes with the gangsters eating and talking are also unprecedented in Jerry’s work. They use sound in a typically original and clever way, with the eating almost destroying the dialogue, and again Jerry is absent from these.
CF: Yes, all the people talking over one another, and then that inexplicable moment when Bambi starts answering a question and we hear Thor’s voice saying the exact same words at the same time. The visual style of The Big Mouth shows Lewis’s materialist emphasis on framing, on the act of it. At the beginning of the highway stop scene, the camera tracks slightly so that Jerry is framed in the crook of a patrolman’s arm. The movement conveys the sense that it’s hard to see Jerry Lewis, which then becomes the point in the way the scene plays out, with all the cops ignoring him.
ASH: The use of fake freeze frames, in which characters in the background are forced to hold still while the narrator speaks on camera are also something new in Lewis. Is it in these scenes without Jerry that film’s distinctiveness lies? He’s eliminating things, which reminds me of a line in the tennis scene that could also be related to the banks and a lack of studio support: “It’s murder to play with just the rackets.”
CF: Like in Blow-Up, another film of 1967.
ASH: Yes, that immediately brought Blow-Up to mind. Also the tennis scenes in Godard and Gorin’s last Dziga Vertov Group film, Vladimir and Rosa (1971), which are so indebted to Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin but also so desultory in their comedy. Does Godard’s love of tennis come from Jerry Lewis? Also, didn’t Gorin show Godard Herschell Gordon Lewis films? Did they see both The Big Mouth and Blast-Off Girls before they became Maoists and formed the Dziga Vertov Group? Colonel Sanders is a very Godardian image to think about. He’s a corporate mascot who is also a military officer and a figure from the antebellum South used in these films during the time of the Vietnam war; he's a colonialist-imperialist emblem.
CF: Gorin talked about seeing Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). I’d be surprised if he saw Blast-Off Girls, but, who knows? I’m sure both he and Godard were very familiar with The Big Mouth.
ASH: And Gorin ended up living and working in San Diego. Maybe he went to Sea World and the Hilton Inn to walk in Jerry’s footsteps and see what he saw. Like Chris Marker with Vertigo in San Francisco. To relive the narrative at a remove, another Frenchman in California.
9. Dziga Vertov Group Plus One
CF: Godard and Lewis are both responding to a degeneration of personality and a corruption of social relations, an instrumentalization of humanity, the turning of people into automatons or things. Godard, and also Tati, understand this transformation in terms of a postwar Americanization of France, whereas Lewis, who as a major Hollywood star is actually an agent of it, also experiences it internally as a conflict that tears him apart at the same time as it wreaks havoc on the world. For Lewis, the search for lucidity is a passage through a separation of identity.
ASH: The Big Mouth is very Godardian. The helicopter shot at the beach that opens and closes the film reminds me of the crane shot at the end of Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One), Godard’s movie with the Rolling Stones from 1968. And at one point while I was thinking that, a gangster in The Big Mouth yells, “Bring out the stones!” Which was also a strange doubling and meta-moment that refers to the diamonds in the movie’s plot but also the two villains in the movie are played by actors named Harold J. Stone and Leonard Stone.
The red, white, and blue color scheme, too, is like One Plus One. It also reminded me of Pierrot le fou.
CF: The red-not-blood of Pierrot is also present in the blood Jerry gets on his hand when he tries to lift up Valentine by the back of the neck.
ASH: Also, for 1967, The Big Mouth is a Godardian film in the way that it’s the last “real” movie Jerry makes before he abandons cinema for his version of world-historical politics in Which Way to the Front? and The Day the Clown Cried, a preoccupation with World War II, the Nazis, and the Holocaust similar to the one that developed in Godard’s later work.
10. Kabuki Theater
ASH: The entire American kabuki section of the film in which Japan and China are mixed together is fascinating and really out-there, even for Jerry. The white, long-haired, teased-out wig he wears combined with his white face paint is truly strange and is something else in the film that connects with the contemporary avant-garde of the time. All of a sudden we are thrust into a happening. Asian motifs were becoming more prevalent in American life in the 1960s, but not like this.
CF: The kabuki/Fong scenes make viewers uncomfortable, but I would argue they’re anti-racist. Fong isn’t meant to be understood as an ethnically Asian character: this is why the casting of the actor, Leonard Stone, can’t be called a simple case of “yellowface”; he’s a white actor who is playing a very strange white person who, for his own unintelligible reasons, is pretending to be Asian. When Jerry meets him in his kabuki disguise, his attempt to act Asian is so absurd it exposes the absurdity of Fong.
If it had been an authentic kabuki ensemble, Jerry’s intervention in their performance would have been intolerably disrespectful, and the scene would have been disgusting, instead of funny. But the kabuki actors, who are obviously white, are cloddish, and their performance seems far from authentic. The casting of whites as untalented kabuki performers is an act of respect toward the authentic tradition. Lewis knew perfectly well he couldn’t do that stuff with real kabuki actors up there. (By the way, “kabuki” is still used by mainstream commentators on American politics. That usage itself, how is that not racist?)
ASH: Why is there a white kabuki ensemble performing in a theater at Sea World? Yet somehow it seems like something that could have existed then.
CF: When Jerry performs with the kabuki ensemble, he’s not making fun of Japanese people; if anything he’s making fun of the deteriorated kabuki of the fake actors. He just tries to follow along with them and come up with things that he thinks might work. What he comes up with is bizarre, funny, and beautiful, pushed beyond the limits of expression in a way that makes me think of John Coltrane’s performances of that same period, during the last year of his life (he died on July 17, 1967), when in mid-solo he would stop playing the saxophone and beat his chest in order to produce sounds.
Jerry’s becoming-Asian is, as you say, in sync with the times, and in a more significant way than his “Asian” routines in his other films (which couldn’t be defended with this kind of argument). Its immediate contemporary context includes the use of Asian stylings by the Beatles and the Stones; Asian-themed concept albums by Cal Tjader, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington; McLuhan’s “global village”; and the circulation of Zen from the American cultural fringe (the Beats) to the mainstream.
It will seem a stretch to view these sequences in The Big Mouth as a protest against the Vietnam War, but that’s the logical conclusion here. By putting on his disguise and attempting to transform himself into some version of a kabuki actor, Jerry is aligning himself with the antiwar positions of the self-“Asian”-izing Beats and hippies.
ASH: Contrast those scenes with: When Mickey Rooney all of a sudden pops in, yelling, as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) it is genuinely alarming and upsetting. The huge, disappointing, and entirely avoidable surprise of Rooney as Yunioshi wounds the film in a palpable way that’s obvious to any viewer. Why did Blake Edwards do that? It’s so clearly a gaffe and a miscalculation. One gasps or screams at it. And I think first viewers of that film should experience it totally cold, without being told about it beforehand.
As for Fong's Asian minions in The Big Mouth, those actors are not given much to do that they can point to with what you’d call pride, I don’t think. Are they exploited by the film? Yes, I think they are. The Big Mouth is not George Takei’s greatest moment. And he was also in The Green Berets the next year.
11. We’re All Water
ASH: The ending recalls the ending of The Patsy but it was not filmed on a set, it’s on location at the seashore. So there really is no “out” here, just the desire to escape into shadow or back where Clamson came from at the beginning of the film. There’s a Jungian quality to this emergence from and return to the sea. And the last name “Clamson” itself connects him to both the sea and to Sea World.
CF: There’s another echo of the ending of The Patsy when Clamson, removing his kabuki disguise, says “it's all make-believe.” Valentine’s return to life at the end of The Big Mouth seems to allude to Lewis’s surviving an accident he had in real life after finishing Three on a Couch, when his yacht took on water and sank, far from shore. He and his party could easily have drowned. His whole career as a performer is a refusal of death; he took that terrible fall during a performance in 1965, which would result in his Percodan addiction, and in what must have been excruciating pain he finished the performance. Stanley falling, then bouncing back up, at the beginning of The Patsy anticipates that.\
ASH: Near the end of the film, a phrase linked here to insanity, coming from the narrator who has been revealed as crazy: “Movies are still your best entertaiment”
CF: Which as you remember was said in The Errand Boy.
ASH: “Movies are your best entertainment” was the official slogan of the Hollywood movie industry in the late 1930s, and the initials infamously spell out MAYBE. There’s a real question hanging over the film: maybe this isn’t entertaining? Is it something else?
12. That’s Not Entertainment
ASH: In the recent documentary about the making of The Day the Clown Cried that was on TCM in December of last year, From Darkness to Light, a phrase comes up about Jerry’s character in the movie that also applied to Jerry in real life by the time he was making it in 1972: “No more the top clown.” The complaint from people in the documentary, especially from Harry Shearer, is that The Day the Clown Cried is both horrible in its subject matter—a clown in a Nazi concentration camp forced to lead children into the ovens—but also not funny in its screenwriting and in Jerry’s performance. It’s as if to say “This Holocaust film that you, a famous comedian, should not have made also isn’t funny enough.” It’s a somewhat fascistic criticism, I think, and a no-win argument. And clowns had already been presented as not funny in Lewis’s previous work, specifically in his clown character Uncle Everett Peyton in The Family Jewels, who wants make so much money he can leave the circus and move to Switzerland (a possible dig at Chaplin). That clown barks out, “Those brats were a means to an end!”
Can we see The Day the Clown Cried as a Vietnam movie, given when it was made? The children are the kids Jerry entertained in the 1950s and early ‘60s now being led in war to their destruction by a man who had entertained them. And this actually happened with one of Jerry’s own sons.
CF: Certainly the war was very much on Jerry's mind while he was making The Big Mouth. It was in production from December 1966 to the end of February 1967. Gary Lewis received his draft notice in November 1966 and was inducted at the beginning of 1967 (he didn't ship to East Asia until March 1968). Jerry spoke of this to a trade columnist who interviewed him during production. There are many resonances with the Vietnam War in The Big Mouth: the various quasi-military teams who are trying to get Clamson, the absurdity of the cops’ obsession with their code manuals, Hodges and his assistants with their redundant forms of destruction, the displaced presence of Asia in Sea World. 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.
13. Something New
ASH: There’s a telling line of dialogue from The Day the Clown Cried, as seen and heard in the partial reconstruction of the film by Kurt Walker and Andy Rector on YouTube. Jerry, as Helmut, the clown, says to a fellow prisoner in the concentration camp yard, “And they said I couldn’t come up with anything new.” In that film, he certainly achieved it: he made, or almost made, something very new. It’s far away from the seaside holiday of The Big Mouth.
The Day the Clown Cried has a clear message for us today against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. As the Nazi commandant played by Anton Diffring says about the Nazi’s killing children, “We are fighting tomorrow’s battles now.” When Jerry takes the children to “a different building,” i.e. to the ovens, or i.e. not a movie theater, after the guard says to him, “Clown, it’s time,” it’s chilling, and very unsettling to see right after The Big Mouth. If the movie had been finished and released, and garnered a horrified reaction, this could have been the last image of Jerry Lewis’s career. In that sense, it’s good the more civic-minded and more modest Hardly Working (1980) emerged as his comeback film. Kind of like Godard’s Sauve qui Peut (la vie) the same year.
CF: The act of leading the children in The Day the Clown Cried is repeated in Hardly Working, when he puts on his clown makeup and costume to deliver the mail, and the children on his route follow him. It’s also anticipated at the end of The Big Mouth, when Valentine turns and goes back into the sea, and all the characters except Jerry and Suzie follow Valentine.
But you’re right, there would have been an irrecuperable finality in that shot of the door closing at the end of The Day the Clown Cried. Lewis’s other movies have open endings; The Big Mouth especially ends in an unstable equilibrium, with Jerry and Suzie on the edge between the sea and the land. They could retire now to the obscurity of their happy ending, or they could enter a new story.
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