I was nearly going to call this Martin and Jerry Lewis's best film ever, that was until Shirley MacLaine began singing that song and laid a golden egg. It's a Dean Martin song that she sabotages, and completely overdoes it in the first of her films that was released even though "The Trouble with Harry" was made first. Fortunately, it's only 3 minutes of torture, and the remainder of the film is actually quite good, surprising because most of their films and Lewis's later films do not appeal to me in the least.
Martin and Lewis play struggling artists who finally find success when Lewis's dreams become the subject for Martin's comic book success that pays off all of their back rent (to landlady Kathleen Freeman), and it's when Lewis runs into MacLaine, posing as a bat woman, that he begins having a variety of fantasies that he verbally expresses while sleeping. A sketch involves Louis running from the bat lady to a heavy set neighbor so his tongue twisting rant about running from the bat lady to the fat lady is actually very funny.
Although he would have her as his love interest in several future films, Martin and MacLaine are not involved here. Instead, he gets Dorothy Malone, a serious minded artist who is concerned about the impact of comic books on the young mind. George "Foghorn" Winslow gets to dramatitize this in a very funny scene where his irate mother leaves him at the publishers office to create all sorts of chaos. Usually seems like this aggravate me because they are badly written and unfunny, but the gags that would normally be dreadful to me really did have me laughing out loud. A subplot of Lewis having military secrets stuck in his brain for some reason makes no sense, but isn't really distracting.
While MacLaine's big number left me cold, other musical numbers succeed such as Martin's Greenwich Village Street number with a group of children and the very artistic title song at the end. The songs aren't Award winners by any means, but they are staged with style and the Vista Vision photography and color is beautiful. Freeman as usual steals perfume moments on screen, and then there's a presence by one of the Gabor sisters (Eva) as the femme fatale. When she says "I'm looking for a man", there are more green acres on the streets of Manhattan than there are in Hooterville. Quite a lot of fun in spite of that one cringeworthy moment.
Martin and Lewis play struggling artists who finally find success when Lewis's dreams become the subject for Martin's comic book success that pays off all of their back rent (to landlady Kathleen Freeman), and it's when Lewis runs into MacLaine, posing as a bat woman, that he begins having a variety of fantasies that he verbally expresses while sleeping. A sketch involves Louis running from the bat lady to a heavy set neighbor so his tongue twisting rant about running from the bat lady to the fat lady is actually very funny.
Although he would have her as his love interest in several future films, Martin and MacLaine are not involved here. Instead, he gets Dorothy Malone, a serious minded artist who is concerned about the impact of comic books on the young mind. George "Foghorn" Winslow gets to dramatitize this in a very funny scene where his irate mother leaves him at the publishers office to create all sorts of chaos. Usually seems like this aggravate me because they are badly written and unfunny, but the gags that would normally be dreadful to me really did have me laughing out loud. A subplot of Lewis having military secrets stuck in his brain for some reason makes no sense, but isn't really distracting.
While MacLaine's big number left me cold, other musical numbers succeed such as Martin's Greenwich Village Street number with a group of children and the very artistic title song at the end. The songs aren't Award winners by any means, but they are staged with style and the Vista Vision photography and color is beautiful. Freeman as usual steals perfume moments on screen, and then there's a presence by one of the Gabor sisters (Eva) as the femme fatale. When she says "I'm looking for a man", there are more green acres on the streets of Manhattan than there are in Hooterville. Quite a lot of fun in spite of that one cringeworthy moment.