Scared Stiff
                          
Director: George Marshall
Year: 1953
Rating: 6.0
So, how did I end up watching another Lewis and Martin film after promising myself to stay clear of them like a bad rash? For the second time in a few weeks? It started with me wanting to watch a bunch of silent films, a period of cinema that I am sadly deficient in. After a few, I watched the silent version of The Cat and the Canary which took me to the Hope-Goddard talking version which took me to their follow-up The Ghost Breakers – which brought me here. A remake of that film with Lewis standing in for Willie Best, Dean Martin for Bob Hope and Lizabeth Scott for Paulette Goddard. Martin and Lewis had not really wanted to do this because they thought the original was a good film – but Paramount still owned the rights and the director of that film, George Marshall, was still available and Martin and Lewis were under contract, so the film went forward.



Obviously, with some changes but also with large chunks of the original script being used. With Lewis in Best’s role, they had to expand it by giving Lewis room to do his shtick – clear the decks and let him do whatever he wants. If you have seen Lewis in action, you know what that means – chaos, improvisation and nails on the blackboard. It can either annoy you to distraction or pull you into the idiocy. I expect little of it is scripted – it can’t be – it must just say “Lewis does his thing”. In one scene he is talking to himself in the mirror and the mirror talks back. In about ten-seconds, Lewis goes through some twenty facial contortions and various screechy voices. And then immediately follows that with a Bogart impression. On one hand, brilliant, on another painful.



With Dean Martin, you have to let him sing. In an early scene he is a singer at a nightclub with Lewis as the busboy. A nice song – but Lewis is committing a spaghetti orgy with it on everyone, breaking up the performance. Martin pulls him on stage and they do a routine which possibly was part of their real nightclub act. Martin is making time with one of the dancers played by Dorothy Malone, who apparently likes doing it with guys in telephone booths. Her gangster boyfriend doesn’t appreciate that and has the habit of killing the guys. He makes a call to Martin, but his pal Lewis picks up the phone and with Malone encouraging him, goes to see the gangster to tell him to lay off his friend. Martin hears about it and goes to rescue his friend. Similar to the original except it was the other way around.




In either case, Martin ends up in the trunk of Scott’s who is going on a ship to Cuba to inherit a castle. Lizabeth Scott is noir to me – the femme fatale – playing the good girl here seems out of character and I kept expecting her to do some backstabbing, physically or emotionally.  They meet Carmen Miranda on the boat – a song or two from her – her last film appearance - and Lewis does an impression of her but eats the banana. Otherwise, it is much the same film - same dialogue - but Martin doesn’t have the smooth quip skills of Hope and the film just doesn’t work as well as the original which felt wonderfully fresh. The songs and Lewis’s facial gymnastics take the film 20-minutes longer than the original, but it ends with a Hope and Crosby cameo.




Maybe it should have been Hope and Goddard though. I did notice that the black woman was not called colored in this version and the quip about the Democrats and zombies was changed to husbands. Progress is welcome wherever you can find it. One's favorability towards this film is entirely dependent on whether you want songs in a horror-comedy film and one's endurance of Jerry Lewis. But I try and tell myself, the man and his act were enormously popular once - just try and understand why.