Il Jolly è impazzito

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.

"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.

I don't have a great number of DVD's and tapes, but this picture is one of them. My father was a good friend of the "CEO" and others involved in the management of the Beverly Hills Supper Club, in the northern Kentucky suburban area of metropolitan Cincinnati. This was a 5-star dining and show facility, with about 700-seat dining/show area, and full, Vegas-style gambling room (the same "interests," from Cleveland, also controlled the Desert Inn in Las Vegas). My parents and I went there often when I was a youngster, and I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Lewis, and several other of the headliners who appeared there. He was very courteous and nice to me, and this was at the high point of his career. It was the era when there were major venues throughout the U.S. - where in addition to Joe E. Lewis - the clubs also had shows starring Sophie Tucker, Jack E. Leonard, Ted Lewis, Jimmy Durante, Nelson Eddy, Billy Daniels, Lena Horne, and many, many others. Joe E. Lewis was in the very top echelon.

The movie is quite factual, overall - a couple of exceptions being that Austin Mack was very, very bald, while Eddie Albert possessed one of the greater heads of hair in Hollywood; and Lewis' wife Martha (played by Mitzi Gaynor) was actually a minor showgirl, and did not become the important Hollywood figure the film depicted. Some have indicated that in later years during his career he drank tea during his "post time" episodes on-stage. While he always had possession of his faculties whenever I saw him, I once asked Sam Tucker, the "capo" in-charge at Beverly Hills how much Mr. Lewis drank; he indicated it was still a substantial quantity.

Mr. Lewis said, when this film was released, that "Sinatra had more fun playing (his) life than (he) did living it." Sinatra's performance here is outstanding, as well as those of the two female leads, and Albert and Coogan, along with all the supporting cast. And this is one of those biographical films where I feel the personas of the subject individual and his portrayer were very, very similar in both their "real lives."

Amazing biography of an amazing man. Joe E. Lewis was the quintessential star of the roaring 20's, with apologies to Al Jolson. A great singer who crossed the wrong people and paid for it with a slashed throat. Sinatra's performance is beyond belief. Already noted as a great actor he outdoes himself. It's been heard that FS "walked" through his roles but not here. Shows how much respect he had for Lewis. A great supporting cast ( Eddie Albert, Jeanne Crain, Mitzi Gaynor and Jackie Coogan) help the film but without the "Chairman of the Board" it would have been just another biography. Sinatra's rendition of "All the Way" is not to be missed. Do yourself a favor and see this movie.

Comedian Joe E. Lewis is best remembered as a precursor of comedians like Rodney Dangerfield and Foster Brooks as well as a pal of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. The common thread was creating one-liners that had something to do with drunks. He is sometimes confused with Joe E. Brown because of his name, though the two had little in common except being in the show business at about the same time. This film starring Frank Sinatra is therefore a kind of personal homage to a friend, one that would hold little interest as a story unless the viewer knew of the connection in advance. In starts sort of nowhere and goes sort of nowhere, relying for its interest on an unusually literate script and some really good direction and camera work. The best scene is one toward the beginning where Sinatra and a radiant Jeanne Crain meet behind a cyclorama in a theater and flirt with each other as the shadowy figures on the other side of the screen are partying. Twenty-first century viewers will find the dialogue, the sets, and the constant smoking and drinking very curious -- sometimes offensive to modern sensibilities. But that is a characteristic common to many films made between the beginning of "talkies" in about 1930 and the introduction of blockbuster mega-films in the late 1950's and early 1960's. The social diameters and definitions of acceptable behavior for women, black people, drunks, so-called burlesque shows, and "cafe society" and the like were either narrower or broader during that time than they are today. This is definitely not a film made from a play or novel requiring attention to literary unities. Still, it hangs together pretty well for anyone patient enough to concentrate on its more dramatic moments. Look for it on Turner Classic Movies.