What you need to understand is, these were the two best-looking guys to ever do comedy up to this point. They were certainly the only same-sex comedy duo with sexual chemistry (yes, I am aware that the Three Stooges slept in the same bed, but it’s not the same), and I’m sure that was very confusing and exciting to 1950s audiences for reasons suppressed and unknowable.There are still some Martin & Lewis movies I haven’t seen, but I’m confident saying that this deserves its reputation as the one with the most ideas beyond “Let’s put a camera in front of Jerry and have him do faces.” Compare this to The Caddy and… there’s no comparison. Frank Tashlin is very proto-Warhol in his “Isn’t all this disgusting stuff wonderful?” perspective on mass culture. At 109 minutes this is definitely about 20 minutes longer than ideal, but hey, I like every scene. In fact, there are some scenes in here that should be better remembered, like when Jerry gets a massage and gets tangled up.Odd that Jerry kept insisting that women aren’t funny when he literally shared the screen with Shirley MacLaine in this movie.
