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You're
Never Too Young
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An obnoxious kid named Marty decked out in a sailor’s
uniform – played by soon-to-be racing car driver Tommy Ivo, who was then about
10 years older (and taller) in reality, to make the consequent situation even
slightly believable – is lured by Wilbur/Jerry Lewis into … a train station
bathroom (identifiable from the swiftly glimpsed wall tiles as the odd
saloon-type doors are swung open). Moments later in screen time (= ellipsis),
Wilbur emerges dressed as that ‘little boy’. The central disguise premise of You’re Never Too Young is hereby
launched – borrowed and gender-switched from Billy Wilder’s directorial debut
in Hollywood, The Major and the Minor (1942).
But hold on! Quite apart from the unspoken
outrageousness of the act shown – its perversity clinched by the sinister and lascivious
look momentarily flickering over Jerry’s face (as is regularly the case in his
movies, Mark Rappaport illustrates it well in The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender [1997]) as the bathroom door closes
– there’s also the tiny matter of narrative consequence. The boy has been
magically separated (we have no idea how) from his mother (Nancy Kulp from The Beverly Hillbillies!), seen only a
few moments earlier in the sequence; we do not know what happens to her, or to
him – is he naked or wearing Wilbur’s suit, unconscious or tied up in the
toilet? Maybe he’s dead? No one asks, no one knows and no one cares – not in
this kind of 1950s cartoonish movie. That kid will never reappear. It’s a taste
of the offhand, bashed-together surrealism to follow.
# #
In 1991, Brian Henderson (1941-2017) published a
brilliant article on “Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and
Preston Sturges” (in Comedy/Cinema/Theory edited by Andrew S. Horton for University of California Press). It builds upon
the painstaking work he had done presenting Sturges’ screenplays in their
published form. There are many radical insights in his essay, but I will engage
just a couple of its tools, loosely, to inspire and inform my discontinuous
commentary on You’re Never Too Young (a film that Henderson doesn’t mention, since Jerry Lewis, with or without Dean
Martin, is never his chosen focus. His text is more about Jean-Luc Godard than
Lewis).
What is cartoon
narrative in live-action cinema? Does it exist, can it be specified? “It’s
hard to say”, Henderson wisely ruminates, “because the question has not been
posed before and the subject has not been studied”. Too true. Beyond the
well-trodden realm of the gag and gagology (Raymond Durgnat’s term), Henderson
(paying tribute to Gérard Genette) especially emphasises two time-elements in cinematic
cartoon narration: ellipsis (jumping forward in the plot) and paralipsis (not
showing and thereby compressing or skipping events that are off-screen,
happening elsewhere, while concentrating on another, supposedly simultaneous,
parallel event). He stresses in Frank Tashlin’s classic Artists and Models (same year as You’re Never Too Young,
1955) the mutually wayward path of these two ‘lipses’: the direct temporal gap
between one thing to the next is often impossible to gauge, and whole tracts of
plot disappear without comment in the camouflaged parts. Fuzziness – on several
interlocking levels of logic, sense, continuity and consequence – rules.
# #
Norman Taurog, it must be said, is neither Tashlin nor
Sturges, although he occasionally veers closer to the former than the latter. There
are dead moments in You’re Never Too
Young when the camera seems fixed in a wide shot, and whatever the
performers manage to do while the filmstrip rolls on is all that gets done in
the mise en scène. But then there are
elaborate set-pieces that really pop, as in the “Face the Music” marching-girls
number – immortally mimicked by a curious band of office-bound chaps in Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) – which is no doubt kicked into high gear by the appropriately zany
choreography of Nick Castle (1910-1968, father of Tap [1989] director also named Nick Castle).
Taurog’s trademark flatness-literalness has its own
inadvertent pay-offs, though. Almost the entire film is an extended documentary
on Lewis’ performance of eternal infantilism, arrested development and infinite
regress, as he wails and contorts his body – it’s truly infectious. That’s why
anyone would want to see the film in the first place, its raison d’être.
But this is less expected: at one point, alone on
stage, Martin sings a number very typical of his Italo-flavoured pop-ballad
œuvre, “Simpatico” (all songs are by Arthur Schwartz & Sammy Cahn, and the
cosmopolitan lyrics here seem the wrong-way-round: “Sympathetic means
simpatico”). As he lurches forward from mid-frame into a closer-up stance,
Martin seems bizarrely intense and contorted. As if often the case with him
fronting up to a camera near or far, and especially when he is obliged to dance
alongside Jerry, he seems caught between an inner, sarcastic,
couldn’t-care-less mirth (part of the Brat Pack aura) – betrayed in the
frequent insouciance of his physical moves and gestures – and acute discomfort.
The weird rubbing-together of supposedly smooth macho and the many humiliations
foisted on Dino by light musical comedy – just like Elvis, embarrassed to be
filmed while doing this fluffy kids’ stuff. In the ‘60s, away from Jerry, he
would get to be the James Bond-ish Matt Helm in what Wiki labels ‘spy comedies’
– and when I saw (probably) The Wrecking
Crew (1969, dir: Phil Karlson! – and later referenced for its Sharon Tate
factor in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood [2019]) as a little kid in the midst of a Catholic weekend church-hall 16mm screening,
it was the local priest who was squirming at the louche decadence (I recall
Dino sandwiched between a dozen nude women and some mink, or something like
that) unfurling up there in Technicolor. What was Father expecting, I wonder?
# #
Another curious name in the credits here is Sidney
Sheldon (1917-2007) – yes, the same guy who, during my teenage days of the
1970s, shot to mass-cult prominence as the best-selling author of The Other Side of Midnight in 1973, adapted
to the screen in 1977. That fruity film melodrama starred Marie-France Pisier
(formerly of Truffaut and Rivette) and underwent serious analysis by none less
than Andrew Britton in Movie magazine
(check his collected works volume). Sheldon had already tasted success with
writing stage musicals in the 1930s and the Cary Grant vehicle The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer in
1947, and he created TV hits in the ‘60s and ‘70s (I Dream of Jeannie, The Patty
Duke Show, Hart to Hart) before
transiting to solitary fame in pop literature.
You’re Never Too Young – “suggested by a
play by Edward Childs Carpenter from a story by Fannie Kilbourne” – sits among similar
assignments Sheldon took on during the ‘50s (including another, subsequent
Martin/Lewis special, Pardners [1956]), mostly light comedies and musicals of various stripes. (It was
Durgnat, again, who pointed out that a certain generic strain of ‘comedies with
occasional songs by star singers’ – there are plenty of them – should really be
regarded as bona fide musicals, but
are so rarely admitted into that sacrosanct pantheon. Wikipedia disparagingly
catalogues them as ‘semi-musicals’.) Sheldon also directed the very weird The Buster Keaton Story, starring Donald
O’Connor, in 1957.
The adaptation/transformation by Sheldon of The Major and the Minor – superbly
constructed by Wilder and Charles Brackett, as I’ve detailed in my 2019 Blu-ray
commentary for Arrow – into You’re Never Too Young queasily rewards
close study. I say queasy because, while some things port over with relative
ease, other things are necessarily mangled for the sake of Martin & Lewis,
and Paramount Pictures. Hence the surrealism.
Let’s start with Diana Lynn (1926-1971). Apart from
appearing in several earlier Martin/Lewis films, she was teen
confidante/accomplice of Ginger Rogers in The
Major and the Minor – and it’s a wink to anyone in the know in 1955 that
she’s back, older but actually less wise or sassy in the adult character of
Nancy here. The Wilder-Brackett script is Paramount property, and so is Lynn –
and so a recycling machine is at work.
Now, in the original, Susan (Rogers) is agonisingly
hiding her true age and identity from military man Philip (Ray Milland) – and
that’s the disguise-obstacle that has to be surpassed before true love can be
authentically, openly allowed to blossom (although there is no shortage of
sophisticated, I-know-but-all-the-same perversity in The Major and the Minor – even if it’s gingerly elevated above the
madly vulgar level of Jerry’s homoerotic toilet abduction). Throughout You’re Never Too Young, Wilbur, with a
likewise burning passion, longs to reveal his actual ID to Nancy (who keeps
shoving a toy doggy into his arms instead). But Nancy cannot end up with
Wilbur, in a direct switch-up of the original. As the romantic prize, she is
destined, naturally, to go to Bob/Dean Martin (and that’s also why, like Dino’s
usual screen ‘conquests’, she’s rather pallid as a character). It’s the given
element of heroic bifurcation in the Lewis/Martin plot, which is not always
easy for its tellers to manage or negotiate without proliferating the possible
character-pairings – as in Artists and
Models.
When Nancy and Bob ultimately unite, Wilbur is left
nowhere on the love plain. The sprightly teenager Skeets who chases him
throughout, yelling “lover boy!”, literally disappears off-stage and off-screen
just as the number “I Like to Hike” begins ( … but there are also male members
of this girls’ school choir?). I was intrigued by this actor, Mitzi McCall (now
89), whose screwy energy here anticipates that of Molly Shannon as Mary
Katherine Gallagher (see Superstar, 1999) or
Rachel Bloom in the sublime Crazy
Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019). McCall’s bio reveals that her shot at TV
variety-show stardom in my birth country of Australia circa 1963 was usurped
by, of all people, her pal Don Lane. Poor Mitzi! It’s no surprise that she won
a slot on Laugh-In in the late ‘60s –
or that she voiced Penny Pillar in several spin-offs of The Flintstones during the ‘70s.
Small but intriguing question: who’s the male equivalent
of the masquerading hero’s ‘best teen pal’ in You’re Never Too Young (i.e., the Lynn part)? It’s a nerdy but sullen,
pug-faced, vaguely rock’n’roll type (also, incidentally, in the plot, son of
the nasty Nina Foch character): Mike, played by an uncredited Whitey Haupt (who
enjoyed only a slight film & TV career). He starts out tough but goes
completely squeamish when he intuits (incorrectly) that Wilbur is a thief and
killer. Then Jerry starts putting-on a Humphrey Bogart impersonation, just for
fun. (For whatever nostalgic reason, Lewis loved this proximity to 1930s
gangster types like George Raft – part of his own ambivalent flirtation with
screen macho.) Since Mike takes very seriously Wilbur’s mock-threat to keep his
mouth shut (or else), he just literally vanishes from the rest of the movie
(like, later on, Mitzi). A panning camera elides him from the frame, and he’s
gone for good. Here, there’s none of that
gather-everybody-for-the-finale-and-give-them-all-a-prize stuff typical of a
different kind of romantic comedy.
Henderson noted two things in Tashlin’s cartoon
narratives: that, on the one hand, various story threads are left uncompleted;
and, on the other hand, that there tends to be an excess of flying-through
endings in the final minutes. Never enough, and then too much. Beyond Tashlin
and Sturges, this rule probably goes for many light musicals in the Hope/Crosby
or Martin/Lewis mode.
# #
Some scenes are ingeniously expanded from passing
details in The Major and the Minor (“Face the Music” in toto appears to
have been suggested by the presence of a boy’s marching team that greets Susan);
while others are more or less kept as is and re-run (like Wilder’s immortal
vignette around the telephone switchboard – sans the cartoonish voice-substitution of Lewis miming to a playback of Foch!). Then
there are new, major plot elements added holus-bolus to the light-genre stew:
Raymond Burr (fresh from Rear Window, 1954) as
the criminal heavy Noonan, forever chasing Jerry (having first pursued Dino)
for a stolen jewel, and himself chased by a phalanx of cops who almost never
appear anywhere or at any time … which is, at least, better form than all those
laboured, contemporary action-comedies where, in a similar triangular chase
structure, everybody has to be tiresomely ‘characterised’ and differentiated.
Realism, schmealism. You’re Never Too Young prefers to present itself, at the
establishing-shot outset, via the surreal telegram delivered by an anonymous
voice-over narrator who will never again be heard from: “This … is Los Angeles. Looks peaceful and quiet, doesn’t it? But
don’t let it fool you! A jewel robbery – and a murder – are about to happen”.
OK! Great way to introduce a comedy.
Note: A late 2021 audiovisual essay by Cristina
Álvarez López and me addresses the marvellous “Face the Music” sequence from
this film, putting it in relation to the re-enactment in In a Year of 13 Moons. See: https://filmkrant.nl/video/the-thinking-machine-54-english/
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