Hardly Working

While this is definitely not one of his better films, this Jerry Lewis movie has moments of pure zaniness and hilarity.

Lewis' comeback would have been an anachronism in 1980, but he was well aware of his fading stardom and to some degree tried to capitalise on it with mixed results. It's a strangely tentative film that lacks the self assuredness and visual panache of his 60's work yet recycles many gags from it. Some of the slapstick gags are funny, and Lewis' dream of being a disco king is an amusing reimagining of a similar scene in The Patsy, but there is no denying how uninspired most of it is.

Basically terrible (and surprisingly shoddily made), but maybe the strangest and most oddly pathos-laden Lewis film i've seen yet. It practically oozes a bizarre sense of self-loathing. Even the horrible Japanese caricature scene seems weirdly self-aware of it's own hideousness (it ends with Lewis being attacked by an angry mob). Adventurous film programmers take note, this would make a truly demented (and possibly brain-frying) double feature with Rick Alverson's Entertainment.

Lewis's first movie in a decade, not counting the aborted The Day the Clown Cried. This one itself hardly seems a finished and polished and publicly presentable piece of work. Plenty of the gags in it could be transplanted in old Lewis movies without positively contaminating the surrounding material, or sticking out from it in sore-thumb manner, although most such gags tend to be duplications of, or variations on, old material anyway.