Review of Visit to a Small Planet

A mildly entertaining film based on a Gore Vidal play. Jerry Lewis is an alien visiting Earth to observe the inhabitants. He causes some mayhem for pompous TV host Fred Clark and gets involved in a romantic triangle with Joan Blackman & Earl Holliman. There's not much more to it...Lewis performs some tricks, mostly involving levitating things. There's a talking dog (and cat!), Gale Gordon as a nosy neighbor and a very funny sequence in a beatnik night-club ("shave my beard and call me normal!") Lewis goons it up in a role that seems to have been tailor made for him, though it wasn't. Directed with a tiny bit of panache by old-timer Norman Taurog (he won the 1931 Oscar for directing SKIPPY), who spent the last fifteen years of his career helming Martin & Lewis films as well as a fair amount of Elvis films.