Over at the Guardian and at film festival panels, Ronald Bergan specializes in curmudgeonly shtick; more than once I’ve heard his mock-rant that teenagers ought to be dispatched to an island far from civilization until they’re grown-up human beings. His obits for the Guardian are often his best work, veering from the crabby persona. But I cannot say a thing wrong about his good and proper defense of Jerry Lewis‘ work as a total filmmaker. (And don’t get me started on the tradition of witless jokes linking Lewis and the French.) Allow me to cite Bergan at uncommon length: “Was Godard so off-target when he made his hyperbolic remark in 1967 that “Lewis is the only one in Hollywood doing something different – the only one who’s making courageous films. He’s been able to do it because of his personal genius?”, writes Bergan. “Certainly, Lewis’s films were radical departures from the other comedies of the day, especially in their free-form episodic structure, surrealist sensibility and metafilmic devices… In 2003, in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, there is a discussion on films between the French and American boys. At one point, the Frenchman says, “You Americans don’t understand your own culture. No wonder you never got the point of Jerry Lewis.” The American replies, “Don’t even get me started on Jerry Lewis.” This exchange crystallises the dichotomy that is supposed to exist between the attitudes of anglophones and francophones towards Jerry Lewis: American no-bullshit pragmatism v pretentious French theorising, or American philistinism v French enlightenment. In fact, it was the critics of the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema who first directed Americans’ attention to Lewis as an auteur. It was also this same magazine that alerted Americans to the value of their own directors such as Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh and Nicholas Ray. Plus, it must be remembered that when Francois Truffaut’s extended interview of Alfred Hitchcock was published in 1967, the director, with his best work behind him, was greatly underrated especially by American critics. Gradually, perceptive American and English critics have begun belatedly to reassess and credit Lewis’s work… Lewis as a performer can make one wriggle with delight one moment and squirm with embarrassment the next. He was at his best when closest to the commedia dell’arte tradition (including the slapstick and sentimentality) and his idol Stan Laurel, who makes an apparition in The Bellboy (1960). Yet, of the dozen films Lewis directed… six of them deserve to be in any cinema pantheon, as well as several starring the comedian, directed by his mentor, former animator Frank Tashlin. Tashlin saw life in terms of cartoon films, which accounts for the crazy flights of fantasy, but it was Lewis’s first films that pushed Tashlin to loosen up his narratives… In 2006, Lewis was presented with the Legion d’Honneur in France on his 80h birthday. But, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: “Lewis’s popularity in America is far greater than any French love of Lewis … American denial of the American love of Jerry Lewis is pathological.” In a way, Lewis receiving the Jean Hersholt award at the Oscars could be seen as a back-handed compliment rather than an honour. It suggests that Lewis, who has never been even nominated for an Academy Award, is being recognised for his annual telethons rather than for the films that made him famous enough to do them in the first place.” As Lewis might put it, it would make Mr. Tishman weep.

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