ARTISTS AND MODELS (1955)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Comedy / Musical

Director: Frank Tashlin

Cast: Jerry Lewis / Dean Martin / Shirley MacLaine

Plot

Starving artist Rick and his imbecilic roommate Eugene fall for their lovely upstairs neighbors, unwittingly getting them all involved in an international espionage conspiracy when Rick’s comic book coincidentally reveals a top secret military code.

What I Liked

A movie that parodies itself, “Artists and Models” is an early example of self-referential pop culture, and has therefore been praised as predicting pop art.  That’s giving this shameless excuse for goofiness and sex appeal far too much credit.  It does, however, work as a sometimes amusing portrait of what passed for entertainment in the 1950s.  Producer Hal B. Wallis and director Frank Tashlin sure set out to piece together as much mass appeal into a single picture as possible.  We’ve got Dean Martin crooning some catchy but unspectacular musical numbers for the grown-ups, Jerry Lewis running his standard goofball-maniac routine for the kids, a fetishistic amount of bare female legs for the boys, some rushed romance scenes for the girls, and an even more superfluous Cold War paranoia subplot for… J. Edgar Hoover?  The real plot, to get as many butts in the seats as possible, is unabashedly obvious.

What I Didn’t Like

Apart from the occasional silly dialogue, the overall upbeat tone, there’s not much for today’s movie audiences to enjoy.  The Music numbers are pleasant enough, but ultimately forgettable.  Lewis’s cross-eyed, tongue-wagging man-child shtick hasn’t aged well and, with only a few exceptions, I can’t imagine it generating laughs out of anyone over the age of ten.  At the time, the sexual innuendos that appear throughout were considered edgy for a Martin and Lewis picture, but today their shock value simply doesn’t exist and many of the jokes go by without even being noticed.  Even the T&A features no T and no A.  It may have been one of the most ambitious movies to be built around Martin and Lewis, who were then possibly the biggest movie stars in the world, but today it comes off as nothing but a thrown together piece of throwaway entertainment that doesn’t really entertain.  It certainly be on any list of movies you must see before you die.

Most Memorable Scene

I’ll admit I did get a giggle out of a few of Lewis’s screaming nightmares where he rattles off some pretty spectacular sci-fi comic book plots to an astonished Dean.  But I was most pleasantly surprised by the not-so-sly “Rear Window” reference that pops up later in the movie.

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5