The Bellboy

1960 slapstick comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Stanley, the titular hotel employee, tries his best to do a good job at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami.

I suppose I should like this a lot more since I'm probably the audience for this. I have a high tolerance for slapstick, especially in the 1920's style that Lewis and company seem to be going for. However, although the above poster promised that I'd giggle, chuckle, and roar, I really didn't do any of the three. Well, maybe there was a giggle in there somewhere. Possibly, I emitted something that somebody who doesn't really know me would label a chuckle. Nary a roar though. Influenced heavily by the comedy stylings of silent cinema, director/writer/star Jerry Lewis's only able to sort of nail it, nailing it like I did when I worked one summer as a carpenter for a guy named Mike. I hit the nail squarely a small percentage of the time when attempting hammering, but mostly, I hit the nail in a way that bent it, missed completely and hit whatever I was trying to nail the nail into, or occasionally connected with my thumb. Once, I hit Mike. So Europe gets the elegance of Jacques Tati, and we get Jerry Lewis with his big clown shoes, but I'm perfectly ok with that because there's always room for a guy with a rubbery face and comically-large shoes. And France embraced the guy anyway, so the joke's really on all of them. I do like that this is short--71 minutes long and that includes the introduction where a guy tells us how this is a plotless "film based on fun." Lewis is good at what he's doing here, again like Jim Carey 30 years before Jim Carey, but probably not in the way you think. The character's mute, for most of the movie anyway, so he has to really exaggerate facial expressions and gesticulations which again recalls the silent era. There are some good bits--a clown car limousine, scenes where Lewis pushes elevator buttons or attempts to answer a phone, ironed pants, a sculpture, the conducting of an invisible orchestra--and they don't have to make a bit of sense because, after all, this is just a "film based on fun." A lot of this falls flat, and a lot more of it is sort of in this in-between haziness between funny and not funny. And I'm not sure where the running gag of a Stan Laurel impersonator falls on that scale. There's a great musical number by The Novelites--"Alabama Jubilee," a song I should probably karaoke if given the chance. And there are some nice moments with the incidental music as well, including some times where the music goes along with the shapes and movements of the characters, almost like in a cartoon. Unless I was just imagining that.