Everyone in The Big Mouth (1967) wants to kill Jerry Lewis. Speaking over one another, the hotel staff in the film (and Lewis, in disguise) express their desire “to crush his skull. And break his arms. And legs. And shoot him. And stab him. And hang him. And electrocute him. And gas him. And poison him.” The Big Mouth followed Lewis’s last collaboration with Frank Tashlin, and a period of personal crises that included an addiction to Percodan. After several commercial duds, his cinema was at a point of inflection, burrowing deeper into itself and tunneling out into a place of narrative obscurity.
While fishing near the beach, Gerry (Jerry Lewis) is given a treasure map to the diamonds of a dying criminal gangster, Syd Valentine (Jerry Lewis). Valentine also provides Gerry with directions to the bayfront Hilton in San Diego, where he is supposed to find the diamonds using the map. Valentine’s map, however, has no plotted coordinates for Lewis to make sense of. It consists of arrows with no starting points that contradict each other, leading to a confusing assortment of unlabeled X’s. The movie mimes this effect, as the viewer is torn between competing narratives, goals, and characters—most of which are discarded by the end, without resolve or any apparent narrative purpose. For Lewis, this is where discovery begins. Gerry ends up crashing into the overburdened arms of his fated lady love, Suzie Cartwright (Susan Bay), and spills the contents of her shopping spree across the hotel porte còchere—a coup de foudre built on Gerry’s clumsiness, one of the only qualities he shares with “The Idiot” Lewis had been creating for more than a decade at that point.
Gerry, owing to another klutzy spill, is not allowed into the hotel, but a manufactured rich persona he comes up with is. (The persona, in turn, is a recreation of Julius Kelp from 1963’s The Nutty Professor.) Flipping the script on The Nutty Professor, Gerry’s unnatural, dorkish performance is a source of refuge from the terror that follows Gerry—he looks exactly like the criminal gangster he happened to fish up on the beach, and is saddled with all the baggage of Valentine’s identity. The film’s narrative functions as an extended chase sequence, beginning and ending on the same shoreline. Scenes collapse in on themselves, doubling Gerry’s own theatrical falls through the film.
In The Family Jewels (1965) Lewis was on the run from himself, acting as both the film’s hero and villain, while in The Big Mouth Gerry feels as if he’s attempting to escape Jerry Lewis’s real-life persona. He had tried playing an adult in Three on a Couch (1966), but audiences rejected him; maybe he was destined to only ever be a clown. Lewis had donned the make-up and costume the previous year, completely hiding his identity to participate in the circus. That experience haunted him: “When a clown is through with a performance, he’s nothing, nobody… if I wasn’t Jerry Lewis, I could have walked through them afterwards and they wouldn’t have known who the hell I was. I trembled so much when I thought about it that I couldn’t sleep.” Come The Big Mouth, he was fighting with all he had to retain an audience without humiliating himself. From a period of time shortly before all this happened, he reflected on his success in letting “The Idiot” go when hosting The Tonight Show, “Maybe I’m growing up. Maybe I’ve stopped hating myself.”
The Big Mouth is even further complicated by how soul-tied it is to Lewis. It is the only movie he wrote and directed while working at Columbia, who took his next picture away from him. It was as much his own reckoning with his status, as it was what led to a corporate rejection of him—one of the last free expressions of a fading star who could feel the walls pressing in. At this point in his career Lewis was famous for his multiple personalities, both on- and off-screen. He was born Jerome Levitch, but brought up as Joseph, and had renamed himself “Jerry Lewis” in preparation for stardom when he was just 16 years old. His parents were largely absent from his childhood. The persona of “Jerry,” then, was not a decoupling from his past pain, but a return to the crying infant who desperately needed the attention of others to survive. Lewis said as much in an interview during this time of his life, “An audience is nothing more than eight or nine hundred mamas and papas clapping their hands and saying, ‘Good boy, baby.’” His opioid addiction revealed further contradictions in his personality to those closest to him, and his wife remarked the following: “He did not act like himself… more than we had ever seen.”
Reading his book, The Total Filmmaker, readers will get the sense that Lewis genuinely did view himself as several distinct personas on the sets for which he acted as writer, actor, director, and producer. In the words of the film critic and Jerry Lewis scholar Chris Fujiwara, “for Lewis, the search for lucidity is a passage through a separation of identity.” The end of The Big Mouth confirms this, as Lewis-as-Valetine emerges from the sea, risen from the dead, to emancipate Gerry from his identity crises. He is finally free to walk into the sunset without fear, reduced to a single man.
The Big Mouth screens this evening, March 4, at BAM on 35mm as part of “The Theater of the Matters: The Big Mouth.”
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