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"The Joker Is Wild" gives us Frank Sinatra playing Joe E. Lewis playing Frank Sinatra. At least that's my read of this entertaining and rather revealing look at a performer's life.

In the 1920s, Lewis is a singer on his way up. Then he tries to part ways with a mobster who thinks he owns the singer and threatens violence if the singer thinks otherwise. Sure enough, Lewis's bid for freedom ends with his larynx slashed and his head busted in. Years later, Lewis re-emerges as a popular nightclub comic, but he's still haunted by what could have been, not to mention a taste for the bottle he works into his stage show a lot better than he does into his life.

Sinatra likened himself to Lewis; he jokes about the two of them forming an Olympic Drinking Team with Dean Martin on his classic "Sinatra At The Sands" album. Perhaps he saw a chance to portray a kindred spirit and a close friend on screen, but watching Sinatra's gritty, unsentimental performance, given at the peak of his career, suggests a deeper agenda. Even Sinatra's friendliest biographers say the man had a dark side, and certainly that is Lewis's situation here, a celebrity who falls into a deeper gloom the more he succeeds, lashing out at those who love him. He's fundamentally decent, but a manic-depressive streak runs deep inside him, coiled around his heart like a rattlesnake.

There's a scene, just after Lewis's wife leaves him, when his faithful pianist Austin Mack (Eddie Albert) suggests Lewis cancel the show. Lewis's reply is the classic entertainer's problem: "What would I do instead?" I get the feeling Sinatra knew that all too well.

Charles Vidor directs this film with assurance and a deft touch, giving Sinatra's early scenes the proper brooding background and his later ones a sense of instability as he amuses his audiences with his cocktail-fueled banter while worrying his friends, who hear the cynicism-bordering-on-nihilism just beneath the surface. The irony of Lewis's life is the bleaker it becomes, the funnier he gets. "I'm fine, I'm fine," he says after passing out on a nightclub floor. "It's you people that are spinning around."

The surrounding cast is competent enough, but this is Sinatra's film, and he carries it off very well, digging into the layers of Lewis's (and his own) tortured, schizoid persona. It's a fair criticism to call this a star vehicle (as Moonspinner55 does in an earlier review here) because Sinatra is sucking up all the oxygen on screen and every scene is designed to showcase his performance. Yet Sinatra's performance merits the treatment, because he serves the story. Watch the scene when Lewis wakes up in his hospital bed and realizes his voice is gone, a scene that works not only because it is so tautly acted but because we all know that's "The Voice" in that bed not able to muster enough vocal power to call over a sleeping friend. Watching him bang a wall in frustration is one of the lumpiest scenes in Sinatra's film career, ironically shot out of focus just like the famous card-showing sequence in "The Manchurian Candidate."

There's also great music, like "All The Way," a Sinatra classic that won an Oscar for this film and is showcased three different times, each in a different way, most effectively the last time, when Sinatra can barely get the words out. You could call this film "Star Is Born For The Straight Guy"; there's plenty of macho melodrama as we watch Lewis charging toward his own alcoholic doom while assaulted with dodgy lines like "I don't know what you're looking for in that bottle, but the faster you run toward it, the farther away it gets."

But the film does have the courage to end on a boldly downbeat note, one that leaves us wondering both about Lewis and the man who plays him. Is showbiz literally worth dying for, as Lewis seems to tell his doctor? Does that make a career like Lewis's heroism or suicide? The best part of "The Joker Is Wild" is the way it leaves you hanging. Was it a cry for help from the Chairman of the Board, or just him letting us know what's what? Your guess is as good as mine.

If only this movie was available on DVD! This movie is good for those people who have had major setbacks in life, and need to start over. It reinforced in me the need to make the best of your situation in life.

Frank played the title role impeccably. I think its a travesty that his performance didn't garner him a best actor nomination. That just shows you how superior the actors of that era were in comparison to the actors of today.

Again, I'm befuddled as to why this movie is not available on DVD. Hopefully, it will be more accessible for viewers who know very little of the acting talents of old blue eyes!

Tremendous 1957 film showcasing the life of Joe E. Lewis. After a brief singing career ended, due to Chicago gangsters, Lewis finds another voice in comedy. Nevertheless, he was left an embittered person unable to even be happy around those who loved him dearly.

After playing a junkie in 1955's "The Man With the Golden Arm," Sinatra again gives a wonderful performance as the alcoholic Lewis. He belts out "All the Way" the way that song was supposed to be sung.

Jeanne Crain is in fine form as the wealthy woman who loved him dearly but did not marry him due to his behavior and the advent of World War 11.

The real surprise here is the wonderful supporting performance of Mitzi Gaynor as the chorus girl that Lewis wed on the rebound. Gaynor proved that she could really act as well as sing and dance here. Her drunken scene where she told Lewis off was great.

Eddie Albert got plenty of practice being around alcoholics when he appeared with Susan Hayward twice in "Smash-Up The Story of a Woman," as well as "I'll Cry Tomorrow." Albert plays the part of Lewis' understanding pianist with conviction.

The ending may be a downer but is true to life. At least, Lewis was ready to stand on his feet despite being alone.

Movie about singer stand-up comedian Joe E. Lewis with Frank Sinatra in the leading role as the beloved and at the same time tragic entertainer who survived a vicious knife attack in Al Capone's Chicago that ended his singing career.

Alone and forgotten years later Joe E. is spotted at the Belmont Race Track by his old friend Swifty Morgan, Jackie Coogan, who thinks that his velvet voice is back,or never really left him. Swifty offers Joe. E a job in a Broadway song and dance number with Sophie Tucker. It turns out that Joe E. is nowhere the singer that he used to be but he had developed a very sharp sense of humor and rapid-fire delivery. That together with a couple of stiff drinks on the stage, to loosen him up, had the night club costumers rolling in the aisles.

We get to see Joe E. Lewis go from being almost forgotten to reaching the top of the entertainment world and then slowly destroying himself and those who loved and cared for him. Like he did to the blood-blooded socialite Letty Page, Jeanne Crain, who wanted to marry Joe E. but finally gave up when Joe E. left her for two years during WWII doing shows and getting drunk, overseas. Marrying showgirl Martha Stewart, not the one that you think but someone else,(Mitzi Gaynor) lasted just two years. As Martha was getting parts in motions pictures Joe E. got drunk doing his night-club act and in the end turned their home into a card playing casino and horse room. With dozens of Joe E.'s friends in attendance where Martha felt that she was a stranger in her own home.

Martha just about had it when she came to visit Joe E. in Vegas, in the middle of making a movie, and got the cold shoulder from him. Joe E. was more interested with the goings on the crap table then with the emotional state of his own wife. Hurt and humiliated by Joe E.'s actions Martha got herself gloriously drunk on a half dozen cocktails told him good-by for the last time and ended up walking, or better yet staggering, out on him for ever.

Joe E. on the stage doing his act really gets hot under the collar when one of the drunk, like himself, and abusive patrons in the audience makes a nasty and snide remark about him and is drunken wife, Martha. That leads Joe E. to get off the stage walk up to him and lay him out together with his friend and on stage piano player Auston Mack, Eddie Albert, who tried to intervene.

"The Joker is Wild" is a movie about the self-destruction of a talented entertainer who was trapped in a bottle because he needed it to preform on stage. At the same time turned him into a drunken an abusive personality that eventually proved to be his biggest enemy by far. More then any of the abusive and obnoxious customers that he had to deal with while he was preforming on stage.

Frank Sinatra as Joe E. Lewis has a chance to sing a number of his biggest hits notably the movie's theme song "All The Way". Sinatra's acting as the troubled and alcoholic comedian is among his best. There's a somewhat up-beat ending with Joe E. seeming to see the light and turn his life around which Joe E. did and outlived the predictions of his doctors who told him that if he didn't stop drinking he'd never live past middle-age. It had been reported from those close to him at the time that in the last years of his life Joe E.Lewis did his night-club act while downing glasses of tea not booze. Still it was obvious that the many years of heavy drinking took a toll on Joe E. Lewis and was a major reason in his not so sudden but very shocking physical deterioration and death.

P.S Joe E Lewish 1971 death certificate it stated that he died of among other things acute alcohol related complication's.

When The Joker Is Wild first came out I saw it at the Nostrand Theatre in Brooklyn, New York. It was the best possible first exposure to Frank Sinatra. He is first rate in this biographical film about the life of Joe E. Lewis. Later on in his film career, Sinatra walked through a lot of roles, but not in this. This is a perfect blend of his persona being tailor made for the part. The supporting cast of Eddie Albert, Jeanne Crain, Mitzi Gaynor, Jackie Coogan, Beverly Garland are also well cast and give Frank excellent support. I have a bootleg copy of this movie, but hopefully Paramount will put this out one day.

The song All the Way is interestingly used in the film. When Joe E. Lewis is a cabaret singer, Sinatra sings it and of course first rate. Later on after the mobsters try to cut his throat and damage his vocal cords, it's used in the background as a reminder of what he had lost.

I don't know if the real Joe E. Lewis ever did any records from back in the twenties. I have heard him do some of his stand-up routines in that gravelly voice the gangsters left him with. Sinatra might have ruptured his own valuable vocal cords if he ever tried to really imitate Lewis. Still it's a marvelous performance.

All the Way won the Oscar in 1957 for Best Original Song, it was the first time a Sinatra song was so honored. Frank was never in better voice and it remains to this day my favorite Sinatra record.

Don't ever miss The Joker Is Wild when it's broadcast.