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Author
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Topic: The Big Mouth (Jerry Lewis)
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Tom Photiou
Film God
Posts: 4837
From: Plymouth U.K
Registered: Dec 2003
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posted December 06, 2015 10:57 AM
Jerry Lewis.
From what i gather people either love him or hate him. Personally,I love his comedy genius, slapstick has always made me laugh more than most comedy's. He also, as i am sure you all know, was one of the biggest ever stars to come out of America, in the 60's he practically had the freedom of Paramount studio's and his movies always topped the box office with the original Nutty Professor being among my favourites. The modern version, (in my opinion), is utter trash.
Onto this 400 footer from Columbia, here is the plot summary,
Gerald Clamson (Lewis) loves fishing on his annual two week holiday. Unfortunately one day at the ocean he reels in an injured gangster in a scuba diving suit named Syd Valentine (also played by Lewis). Syd tells Gerald about diamonds he has stolen from the other gangsters and hands him a map. Gerald escapes as frogmen from a yacht machine gun the beach. They swim ashore and locate Syd where they machine gun him. Gerald heads to the Hilton Inn in San Diego where Syd claimed the diamonds were hidden. There he meets Suzie Cartwright (Susan Bay), an airline stewardess. While searching for the diamonds, he needs to avoid the hotel staff after inadvertently hurting the manager (Del Moore). Gerald disguises himself as a character noticeably similar to Professor Julius Kelp from The Nutty Professor, while trying to stay one step ahead of the other gangsters who are on his tail, as well as the hotel detectives led by the manager—all the while courting Suzie. As each of the gangsters see Gerald, an identical lookalike to the deceased Syd, they have nervous breakdowns; one imagining himself a dog, one turning into a Larry Fine lookalike, the other (Charlie Callas, in his usual character) becoming a hopeless stutterer. The one man Gerald meets who believes him, who identifies himself as a FBI special agent, turns out to be an escapee from an insane asylum.
The movie climaxes in a chase where Gerald is pursued by Thor's gangsters, a rival group of gangsters who had made a deal with Syd to buy his diamonds, and a group of Chinese who smuggle the diamonds disguised as plastic pearls.
They return to the Pacific Ocean, where Syd reappears. The gangsters chase Syd into the ocean, and Gerald and Suzie walk away, deeply in love. The diamonds presumably are never located.
The narrator in this short is actually not too bad, the voice seems to be a different tone altogether from the others and it isn't anyway near as intrusive, in fact its kept to the point and also very minimal.
There's a little story behind this film for us.
We originally bought a copy of this film for £16 from movieland international many years ago, we knew at the time of purchase that it was an ex library print so it was full of black lines. Many were cleaned out with 222 but there are still a lot there.
Browsing through Barry's Indi 8 list i spotted a copy, not only that it was in his 50% sale so it was £8.00 + P+P.Knowing how many of these Columbia copies have faded i asked the question and, as Barry said, its £8 so well worth a look.
Well, what a great surprise, only very little colour shift and its in superb condition, hardly a mark worth mentioning so after around 30 years we have now replaced a worn print with a great print.
It has to be said that the print is pin sharp and the sound,as always on theses Columbia cut-downs, is A1 with excellent bass as well as clarity.
Having recently seen the feature on disc i believe that this 400 footer is actually much better, the comedy flows better and all the main funny sequences are included here all within a very funny 20 minutes.
These images really do not do the print justice, i must try and do better ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif) ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
[ December 09, 2015, 03:05 PM: Message edited by: Tom Photiou ]
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