Customer Reviews

Artists & Models [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This movie was a ton of fun. The classic scene "Bat Lady & Fat Lady" scene between Martin & Lewis made the picture. A very young (and quite attractive) Shirley MacLaine adds to the picture with a bit of wit.

When I showed this picture to my son he couldn't stop watching it. Whenever we go to the video store he asks to rent it. I figure that there are a lot of clean movies out there like this one that kids would love if only we adults would expose them to em. Of course for its time it shows quite a quantity of lovely ladies.

My wife absolutely died over the scene when Jerry tries to get his back fixed. This will definately be bought for my son's next birthday. I suggest you don't wait that long.

It is difficult not to like this brilliant Frank Tashlin film. He did cartoons in the 1940's, and he adds surreal cartoon gags here as he did in his other under-rated film THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT. Made when Washington was investigating pin up girls like Bettie Page and horror comic books, the subplot and plea in support of kids comics was very rare for the era.
I have often said that you don't have to like Martin and Lewis to like a Frank Tashlin movie. This is the film to show people who don't get the pair. Dean gets to sing entire songs, Lewis does a scene imagining a steak dinner that works on any age group, and you will not believe how hot the young Shirley MacLaine looks in a Bat Girl costume.
Now, if they could get a letterboxed dvd out........

Considering all that has happened since, it becomes easy to forget just how great Martin and Lewis were in the early to mid fifties. This was the first of their films that I saw and, to me anyway, it remains the best and a showcase for just how much fun they were. An additional plus is a very young Shirley MacLaine, who even then displayed an incredible screen presence in what could have been a throwaway role. She outshines Dorothy Malone and set my five-year-old heart on fire. They don't make movies like this any more and that's a shame. Shirley, wherever you are, I've been waiting.

Although the humor is a little childish and cartoonish at times, it was meant to be! In this Tashlin outing, Martin and Lewis team together again in a light and entertaining spoof of censorship and comic book culture. The Cold War plot thrown in at the end is timely, though out of place, in an otherwise exceptionally goofy live action cartoon.

Each time is the first time...the scene with Shearly and Jerry is so funny and each time seems to be the first! ...And Dean is so handsome!

This is a delightful romp with funny situations and good songs. My favorite Martin & Lewis movie, and one of the first movies of Shirley MacLaine.

It's a cute movie. It leaves some plot holes and can be silly, but it's fun and upbeat. Not my favorite, but not bad.

This movie deserves 5 stars for the amazing colors in it!I love this movie especially when Shirley McLain sings waiting for Jerry to come up from his apartment.I love the music in their movies.Dean Martin had such a beautiful voice.

Serendipitous to the extreme. Maybe America looks brightest in satire. Everything is here, from the obvious (Frank Tashlin in his first project with [Martin &] Lewis; score by Harry Warren & Jack Brooks; costumes by Edith Head; Shirley MacLaine to die for) to special (longtime Lewis crony Kathleen Freeman; George "Foghorn" Winslow as the obnoxious kid; Mouseketeer Sharon Baird accompanying Martin on "Lucky Song"). Every scene is perfect, even the ones nobody has ever seen. Martin never sang with such dreamy assurance and Lewis never ... well ... maybe Lewis did conjure zanier laughs in his own films but, drop dead, he kills here every time. And wow, how did MacLaine hold her own in scenes with Lewis but "Innamorta (pt 2)" is proof. Now there's intellectuals everywhere who'll tell ya Tashlin was "not uncomfortably aware of the outrageous, plastic, dehumanized nature of his own vision. He is a product of and a commentator on show-biz consumer hype. These two potentially contradictory attitudes are homogenized into a structure that flattens satire onto its object, leaving no space for shifts in perspective from irony to acceptance or from identification to alienation (Angelos Koutsourakis, Bright Lights Film Journal)." Hoo ha, you tell 'em, boss! Tashlin devours every thing, from the 3 Stooges to Sigmund Freud. Watch the water and the smoke. Simply put, Artists and Models, besides being romantic, funny and weird, was sorta clever in that the whole mess of a plot speeds up until the movie about comic books just plain turns into a comic book. Comics as art, maybe this was Lichtenstein's favorite matinee. Personally, I think the surrealest scene is one without Lewis: dig the rooftop bit with Dorothy Malone ~ Martin's hands and voice are both disembodied in Malone's perception. Then the same tune in a different world. Part of the symmetrical magic is that Martin and Lewis get a lot of solo screen time (even "When You Pretend" is done in two parts). Whatever the offstage turmoil, Artists and Models has all the juice that made these lads the missing link between The Marx Brothers and (early) Woody Allen. Plus Shirley MacLaine. This is one of the sweetest movies ever made. Despite Lewis wearing his pinky ring.

ARTISTS AND MODELS (1955) Written and directed by Frank Tashlin.
Costumes by Edith Head. Make up by Wally Westmore.

Starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley Maclaine, Eva Gabor, Anita
Ekberg, Jack Elam, George Winslow, Otto Waldis, Steven Geray and
Dorothy Malone.

Two down on the luck bohemian types with artist and author ambitions
find themselves involved, in quick succession, with a frigid but
passionate female artist, a randy but frustrated(and considering who
she has her sights set on desperate) model, the horrors of the comic
book industry and finally communist spies. After several good musical
numbers involving the artist and endless spastic mugging and attempts
at scene stealing by the writer, the whole confused slapdash mess ends
and the viewer is left to ponder that eternal question. Jerry Lewis??

While very much and pleasingly so a Fifties era film, several very
respectable musical sequences featuring the amazing Dean Martin, a
truly great and Code threatening performance by Malone as a woman who
hates Martin with all her soul and yet wants his rough dirty hands
running all over her body(Martin and Malone are the only reason to see
the picture), and mostly pleasing cast of familiar faces--exceptions to
be noted shortly--the picture is mostly a scattershot out of control
mess with a incoherent and sloppy script that is all over the place,
never settling on a plot. In short a typical Paramount production.

Worse still is the presence of two performers whose careers are simply
unsolved mysteries. The dull and uncharismatic Gabor who never gave a
true performance in her life coasting on what passed for her
personality and her Hungarian accent. And finally the staggeringly
annoying Jerry Lewis who almost makes the cancerous 40s "comedian" Hugh
Herbert palatable. Truly great comedians are actually actors who,
however wacky their behavior, are playing recognizable characters with
consistent traits and personalities. And then there is Lewis who is
simply an egotistic blowhard mugging mercilessly and just doing
anything to get attention and steal it from anyone else. It is not
hard to see why Martin eventually became fed up and left. This viewer
was fed up after about 30 minutes.

Of passing note, besides Waldis who starred in RED PLANET MARS, the
picture has some slight Sci Fic elements involving a secret formula and
Lewis' character having what appears to be psychic abilities that
manifest themselves only during the epileptic fits he calls sleeping.
And there is the subplot involving comic books obviously commenting on
the Frederic Wertham crusade and, one believes, some stock footage from
possibly CONQUEST OF SPACE. So genre fans might wish to give it a look.

Not terrible by any means. A silver age film has to work pretty hard
to be that and, as stated, there are good elements but oh that script,
that Gabor and that Lewis. Paramount strikes again.

Arrgh.