While Ray Evans and Jay Livingston may have had some song hits still sung today, don't expect to hear any of them in this military comedy that made me long for Abbott and Costello or Joe E. Brown or Bob Hope or Laurel and Hardy or Durante and Keaton or any of the other comics who did films about buffoons serving their country. Lewis and Martin have always been an acquired taste, and this first pairing in the lead after the two Irma films left me thinking that I had just eaten something rancid.
First of all, there's no real plotline, just a bunch of extremely dated sketches featuring Jerry Lewis and giving the opportunity for Dean Martin to sing some forgettable melodys even he's had better songs. Jerry Lewis can't decide if he's being a thinner version of Lou Costello or an updated version of Stan Laurel, going from persona to persona, and giving one of the worst drag impressions in film history. It's definitely the one time that cross-dressing in movies was a drag.
Mike Kellin plays the typical beleaguered sergeant, and Dean Martin outside of his singing and romancing isn't very likeable. I expected to see a lot more of Polly Bergen, having appeared in a few B westerns, and unfortunately, she has very little to do. As for the other women in the ensemble, they are Paramount lot starlets who didn't have much screen presence, either stereotypically sweet or blandly bad. A handful of laughs made me cringe that I found any of this funny. This is not amore. This is a-messy.
First of all, there's no real plotline, just a bunch of extremely dated sketches featuring Jerry Lewis and giving the opportunity for Dean Martin to sing some forgettable melodys even he's had better songs. Jerry Lewis can't decide if he's being a thinner version of Lou Costello or an updated version of Stan Laurel, going from persona to persona, and giving one of the worst drag impressions in film history. It's definitely the one time that cross-dressing in movies was a drag.
Mike Kellin plays the typical beleaguered sergeant, and Dean Martin outside of his singing and romancing isn't very likeable. I expected to see a lot more of Polly Bergen, having appeared in a few B westerns, and unfortunately, she has very little to do. As for the other women in the ensemble, they are Paramount lot starlets who didn't have much screen presence, either stereotypically sweet or blandly bad. A handful of laughs made me cringe that I found any of this funny. This is not amore. This is a-messy.