The Shrinking of Gore’s PLANET.

There are parts in VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET where Jerry Lewis astounds us with his physical art, yet that is not enough to save this attempted comedy from an atrocious script that exudes astronomical ignorance, and by that I mean: ignorance in astronomy… or maybe, also…?

Jerry is Kreton, from an alien race that lives “on the other side of the universe” (whatever that means), who revels in visiting Earth against the orders of his supervisor, Mr. Delton (John Williams – not the composer, just an old That Guy). On this particular visit, Kreton befriends a middle-American family and stays with them a few days, with the approval of Mr. Delton, on the proviso Kreton only studies them and doesn’t get involved. But Kreton starts helping the family with his omnipotent alien magic, and seemingly gets entangled romantically with the daughter, so Mr. Delton removes Kreton’s powers. It’s played as “a lesson to Kreton” to show him how painful it is to be an Earthling – but Kreton never once wished to be an Earthling. Unless I missed something.

Also, Kreton maintains all love and sex has been excised from his species, so how does he end up desiring the family daughter Ellen (Joan Blackman)? Or is it a simulacrum of desire that he cannot comprehend is not real? So many interesting questions never posed or answered. Kreton gets hubristic, thinking “falling in love” won’t lead to any trouble, and that Mr. Delton won’t be the wiser of Kreton contravening his conditions – all while being part of a culture where he KNOWS he can be spied on 24/7 by Mr. Delton, who can intervene with magic at any time. Which Delton does, zapping Kreton’s powers away. And in doing so, causes Kreton’s trouble. Is anyone paying attention to the contradictions? Or did I miss something else?

VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET was originally a Broadway play written by Gore Vidal, which starred none other than Eddie Mayehoff (Jerry’s father in THAT’S MY BOY)! Earning three Tony noms, it also aired as a TV play in May 1955, and was apparently an intelligent satire on Earth’s self-destructive nature and how aliens misapprehend that nature, the tagline being: A visitor from another planet arrives on Earth and seems anxious to provoke a war – “one thing you people do really well”. (Almost THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, 1951.) Which might explain why Vidal was incensed at Jerry Lewis being tapped for the film version. He knew his concept would be shrunken down to a mere nub of its original intent. But if only Jerry had followed through on his GEISHA BOY introspection and made VISIT faithful to its source material, that might have elevated his cache as a serious filmmaker, and might have saved this confused mess of a dog turd.

Bland, irritating, minimally funny, screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Henry Garson, with director Norman Taurog (who did six other Martin-Lewis movies), scream their inadequacy of astronomy dialect with almost every line of “space” dialogue. In the beatnik bar (which is the most cogent sequence for being so “far out”) someone asks where he can get silver space-duds like Kreton’s, and Kreton replies, “Well, do you know where the Milky Way is?” and points up somewhere. (Daddy-O, you’re IN the Milky Way!) “Well, you turn right at the second nebula” (they obviously don’t have any clue how amorphous a nebula is), “and it’s the third planet at the end of the star cluster.” (Jargon they picked up from an encyclopedia supposed to sound space-y.) To fully deconstruct even this one sentence, we’d have to re-educate the writers from kindergarten: How do we find the third planet past a star cluster if all the stars have planets too? And planets don’t float in arbitrary deep space – isn’t the planet you speak of orbiting a star itself, and doesn’t that make the planet’s star part of the cluster? It’s like Han Solo saying, “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” Bullshit dialogue that someone thought sounded like legit space jive. Speaking of which, Kreton’s age is “21 million light years” – and we thought Han was the first doofus to confuse distance with time.

As a youth, I was inclined to think GEISHA BOY was a slow-pacer, and now appreciate it for its depth, whereas VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET was a great lark when younger, but now I realize it is purely for kids and non-thinking adults.

Fred Clark is the father (veteran of two other Martin-Lewis adventures), and Lucille Ball’s own Mr. Mooney, Gale Gordon, over-emotes as a scared neighbor. Buddy Rich cameos as a beatnik drummer.

Tangling with her boyfriend Conrad (tiresome, overacting Earl Holliman), on the couch, I did a double-take when Ellen actually said the line, “Conrad, as you may have suspected, I find you sexually attractive. But you just don’t have any money.” In a 1960 movie! With her mother in the room! Also – blatantly coming right out and admitting she’s a gold-digger. With her mother in the room! Also, Conrad accosting her openly and begging to get married, if not, laid – with her mother in the room! Our culture has moved too far for me to discern exactly how inappropriate or not these kids are being, or whether it’s just another poorly-written scene. Later someone says, “We do think an awful lot about sex around here – but it only happens when no one is looking.” Is this a Jerry Lewis movie, or are these lines left over from Gore Vidal?

Kreton’s powers would be a precursor to the Marvel movies that would come 55 years later, where he can do anything the plot calls for, without any rationale: he can time travel to any point in Earth’s history, disintegrate objects, levitate cars, make a camera spurt milk in someone’s face, tune in on people’s thoughts and enable the pets to talk. While he tries to explain some powers, there is no explanation for these others, so why bother explaining any of it? It’s magic who cares fuck you.

For context, this film was one of the first to poke fun at alien beings, or view them as inept pratfallers; released into a movie climate packed with malign extra-terrestrials, like the aforementioned EARTH STOOD STILL, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)…

When Mr. Delton takes away Kreton’s powers, there is no lesson learned: no pondering on what sacrifice Kreton might have made to retain true love; no yearning on the love he lost by choosing to fly away with Mr. Delton. Just a nothing ending; all he’s learned in his time studying humans, is that he doesn’t want to be without his powers.

We don’t like seeing him much without his powers of comedy either…

END

Sad.

THE SAD SACK is Private Meredith Bixby (Jerry Lewis), an inept dogsbody who is, for his mechanical skill, given the chance to succeed in the military by a female major, who orders another Private to surreptitiously shepherd Bixby through adversities, such as everyday life in the military. The title might imply someone moping around like a killjoy – which Bixby does not do (in fact, he is inexplicably optimistic, with an amazing photographic memory) – but it is actually military slang for “sad sack of shit,” meaning a total fuckup. Of course, this movie’s family demographic prohibits it from getting anywhere near that phrasing.

It’s the stupidest plot in a Jerry Lewis film since SAILOR BEWARE. That movie was also military-themed. Proving that Hollywood writers ran out of ideas for military comedies a long time ago.

Based on the unnamed 1942 cartoon character by Sgt. George Baker, I guess Jerry is probably one of the few people who can carry off being a cartoon klutz, but the story is so stupid and the characterizations so irritating that no amount of Jerry mugging can save this sad sack of shit.

Private Bixby is shielded from harm by Major Shelton (Phyllis Kirk, HOUSE OF WAX). She’s a soldier, a psychiatrist, and a dame. And that seems to throw every man who comes into contact with her into brain farts. When she summons Corporal Dolan (David Wayne) to tell him about Bixby’s potential and him needing a protector, she has to qualify her position and her orders, because – hot female. Dolan: “You’re quite a departure from the usual Major!” Is that how the army allows you to speak to superior officers? Not unless they have tits, I guess. Constant sexism dogs Shelton’s every encounter with males: “Aren’t you being overly sentimental?” Shelton: “Sentimental?” Male: “Well, you ARE a woman.” Somebody shoot the writer.

And then – in a total reversal of what the film is saying by placing a woman in the empowered Major’s role – she falls for Dolan like a schoolgirl crush. Why? Was it his runneled 43-year-old face that was meant to look 20? Was it how doughy his backside looked in those Army issue pants? And he didn’t even sing her a song to wet her down. Speaking of which, Dolan’s role was written for Dean Martin. (Even the name Dolan was reminiscent of “Dogface Dolan” from Martin-and-Lewis’s JUMPING JACKS.) In retrospect, we can clearly see the demarcation line between Martin and Lewis films and Jerry’s solo career, but back in that year (with only this second solo Jerry movie in launch), studio movies and their contracted personalities were an ongoing business venture, and the producers that made major bank off Martin-Lewis were regarding the breakup as a simple separation, and were still commissioning movies fully with the intent to place Martin and Lewis side by side again; maybe not in the next one, or in the next two pictures – let the boys get their ya-yas out! – but there would come a time when the teammates would see the folly of their separate ways and eventually come back together like atoms circling a nucleus. It was Science. And it was Hal Wallis, the producer whom Martin and Lewis OWED three more movies under contract, and Hal would not be denied his pound of flesh…

Jerry didn’t want to do another military movie, feeling he had done all he could with the format in his 3 Martin and Lewis military pictures (AT WAR WITH THE ARMY, SAILOR BEWARE, JUMPING JACKS); he was also exhausted from a hectic schedule of live shows, recordings and producing his last film himself (life without Dean was proving just as lucrative and rewarding!) but Wallis was waving contracts in his face and creeping like a lawyer; it allowed him to force director George Marshall onto the production, whom Jerry hated working with since the days of MY FRIEND IRMA.

For whatever reason (maybe wartime authenticity?), this is Jerry’s second black and white solo film in a row.

Larry Dolan was paired with another numbnuts named Stan (overacting Joe Mantell), making their character names Stanley and Larry… a tad close to Stanley Laurel; and their antics almost resemble Laurel-and-Hardy’s, if it weren’t for the fact that Dolan had to retain a semblance of leading-man cool (of which he had none anyway). Also, it just doesn’t look right that both these guys are considerably shorter than Jerry.

After what seems like interminable oft-seen Jerry gags (as he feared, he was repeating himself), Bixby is assigned to Morocco, and Dolan is sent as shepherd. In an exotic bar there, Bixby falls for a Parisian femme fatale (Liliane Montevecchi, an exotic brunette who looked nothing like the American pointy-bra dames that populated Jerry’s films), and gets mixed up in a terrorist plot, while trying to join the French Foreign Legion. Peter Lorre and Michael Ansara (renowned That Guy) are the villains who use Bixby’s photographic memory to force him to build one of the new American cannons.

The French Foreign Legion actually appear in the final frames to pin a medal on Bixby for foiling the plot (inadvertently, of course). Ah, so this is where the French love affair with Jerry started!

END