Can you explain to me where does it come from that the French are supposed to be Jerry Lewis fans? As soon as somebody recognize my accent I’m asked, “How can you like Jerry Lewis movies?” I lived this last 30 years in France and I never met any Jerry Lewis fan. If you ask to 100 persons in the street for a J.L. movie title you’d difficultly have a few answers, and lot of people would made a confusion with a rock ‘n’ roll star. Excuse my limited English but I just start learning it, reading your books.
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Better buy the whole set, mon frere. On the J.L. issue, your bafflement is a consequence of your youth. Jerry Lewis was hot in France in the 60s but today is remembered only vaguely and in some quarters, dare I say it, even scorned. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who lived in Paris in the early 70s, says when he was interviewed a couple years ago by the French rock weekly Les inrockuptibles, “They mentioned in their introduction, as an indication of how weird I was, that I preferred Jerry Lewis to Woody Allen.”
The French affection for Jerry Lewis has always mystified Americans. Highbrow critics (the only kind France has) wrote appreciatively about his work beginning in the 1950s, but things didn’t really get nuts until Jerry’s visit to France in 1965. Though past his peak in America by then, he was mobbed at the airport by fans and the press and was the toast of Paris for a week. French critics, who had voted The Nutty Professor the best film of the year, gave him an award, an art cinema put on a three-week Jerry Lewis festival, and the French film library held a retrospective with seminars on Jerry’s art. Rosenbaum recalls Lewis hosting a two-hour prime-time show on French television in the 70s, with “guests like Louis Malle literally at his feet.”
