Scared Stiff(1953) and 3 Ring Circus (1954); I left out Stiff only because I had previously posted a detailed piece on that remake of The Ghost Breakers (1940), and Circus got excised only because I wasn’t able to track down a copy to refresh my memory in time for the ‘thon (I had seen the movie only once—many, many moons ago). “[F] or what it’s worth, I don’t remember it being very good,” I observed in the essay. Having had an opportunity to re-watch Circus—it aired in April of this year courtesy of The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, as part of a night-long feting of Zsa Zsa Gabor—I need to clarify that comment. It’s not as terrible as I remember. (But it’s still the weakest of the Martin-Lewis oeuvre, in my opinion.)
| Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin |
Jerry soon gets a promotion, too; he’s drafted to replace one of the clowns who’s taken ill—but he quickly runs afoul of Puffo (Gene Sheldon), the circus’ big draw in the clown department, who resents Jerry’s innate ability to garner laughs and love from the crowd. (Puffo also has a bit of a problem where the bottle is concerned—I was calling him “Wino the Clown” after a fashion.) When Puffo gives an “either-them-or-me” ultimatum to Jill, she gives him his walking papers and promotes Jerry to full-time made-up mirthmaker. But the relationship between “Jerrico the Wonder Clown” and his pal Pete becomes strained, particularly when Jill leaves the circus after Pete refuses to shut down the lucrative gambling concession he’s initiated on the fairway.
3 Ring Circus is acknowledged by many to be the catalyst in what ultimately dissolved the partnership between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. If this were a courtroom trial, the movie would be Exhibit A—Circus is little more than a vanity showcase for Jerry with Dean merely along for the ride. It was a troubled production, and the early script drafts (the screenplay is credited to Don “Congo Bill” McGuire, a pal of Jerry’s who would direct Lewis’s first solo film, The Delicate Delinquent[1957]) featured, in Lewis’ words, “ten minutes of my character, then ten minutes of Dean’s, before the two of us even met.” There was a lot of re-writing (Jerry: “[W]hen you have a Martin and Lewis picture without the 'and,' you don't have much”) but McGuire and Lewis were unable to get around Circus’ chief weakness (something that’s prevalent in both The Stooge [1953] and The Caddy [1953]): Martin’s character is an unlikable wanker. “There was no sense in me being in that picture at all,” Dean would later observe of Circus. (I sympathize with the guy.)
| Elsa Lanchester in the hit Broadway musical Goodbye, Dignity! |
| Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joanne Dru |
| I wish I had a better screen grab of this...but Kathleen Freeman has a bit as a custard customer who winds up wearing the product. (Is this the first time she and Jerry appeared together onscreen? I'll bet it is.) |
What I found so amusing about Gabor and Gene Sheldon’s characters (Gene is Puffo the Clown) is that they are detestable prima donnas, and I’m curious to know whether this was the norm in the ol’ circus game (“That Emmett Kelly is a real dick!”) or if screenwriter McGuire had someone in Hollywood in mind. Speaking of circus, the real-life Clyde Beatty organization stands in for the film’s fictional “Clyde Brent’; it wasn’t the only motion picture to use the Beatty big top as background in 1954—I’m thinking, of course, of Ring of Fear. (Circusdirector Joseph Pevney complained to producer Hal Wallis when Wallis only sprang to build one circus ring for the movie, and finally the cheapskate capitulated to pay for the remaining rings. That generosity ultimately led to the movie’s title—in pre-production it was known as Big Top.)
Because 3 Ring Circusfigures mostly as a movie that gives Jerry Lewis carte blanche (a little French for his fans) to live out his fantasies as another Chaplin (he even mentions in Dean and Me [A Love Story] that “I’d wanted to play a clown ever since I’d seen my idol Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 picture The Circus”) the real laughs in this picture come few and far between. The funniest moment for me arrives toward the end, where Jerry and the circus are performing at an orphans’ benefit…and try as he might, he can’t seem to make one little girl with leg braces laugh. His inability to make the little handicapped girl chortle brings on the waterworks in “Jerrico” …and that’s when the little tyke starts enjoying herself in jovial mirth. She probably wouldn’t think it was so damn funny if she was able to gaze into the future and the comedian’s legendary cinematic abortion The Day the Clown Cried (1972)—a film jokingly described by one of the Chapo Trap Houseguys as “if the Holocaust is happening to you, all you can do is laugh…if you can’t collaborate.” (Seriously, the first thing I said when I saw that po-faced little tyke was “Clearly she’s not French.”)
| Sandy Descher as the little girl who figures out what many will learn in life: solo Jerry Lewis t'aint funny, McGee. (I keep hearing Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette (1947): "This kid's gonna grow up to be a sponsor.") |
