The Bellboy
Director: Jerry Lewis
Year Released: 1960
Rating: 2.0
Plotless wonder about a bellboy (Lewis) who continuously screws up at his job and warps his own face like a Francis Bacon painting - if he wasn't fired after removing the engine from a car and delivering to the family's hotel room as if it were luggage, he'll never be. Without a story, your reaction to this depends on your internal Jerry-O-Meter (everybody's got one) and whether or not you can stomach the physical comedy (which is more subdued than in films like The Ladies Man or The Nutty Professor) and find the prospect of, say, Jerry conducting a silent orchestra or eating an invisible apple to be appealing. Sometimes the payoffs work (the Milton Berle sketch), sometimes they fail (the Stan Laurel running gag), but in Lewis' defense, you can't expect much from most comedies after close to half a century has passed.
