Le trouillard du Far-West

The plot is quite simple: Dean Martin is the rodeo riding, singing cowboy, and foreman of a ranch. Jerry Lewis is a rich kid who wants to become a real cowboy, and hence he becomes the clumsy (unwanted) sidekick of Dean Martin. Oh, and for good measure there's some bad guys trying to take over the ranch, as well...

If you expect "Cat Balou", don't watch this. This is no comedy for adults, as its slapstick humour is horrendously outdated, and the set-pieces are all too cliched. This movie is fun for kids, because it is so naive and harmless, and the violence is never serious. Also, the characters are just as simple as Stan and Ollie, just as loveable if you're a kid.

As adult, I'd recommend to grab a "Cat Balou" tape instead, for a good classic western comedy.

This is a great Martin and Lewis Comedy from 1956, which is the same year that they broke up as a Comedic Duo, and this film "Pardners," was the second to their last that was made. Jerry's father and Dean's father were the best of friends, and died together in the hopes of saving their land. And of course, the story picks up with the children fully grown and ready to go back get some justice in the western town in which they were both born. Dean has some great singing numbers in this film, and Jerry's special brand of physical comedy is very effective in a number of saloon fight scenes. A very entertaining comedy!

I'd heard a lot of great things about the comedy pairing of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. I'd seen Jerry Lewis in some other films before this (such as "The Nutty Professor" and "Rock-A-Bye-Baby") where he didn't really stand out as being a comedy legend, if anything he just seemed really annoying at points.

However I wasn't going to let that get in the way of enjoying what I had heard was a great double act.

But... this movie kind of sucked.

The most important thing that a comedy needs is to be funny, and unfortunately this doesn't quite hit the right mark. Jerry Lewis screaming and whining in that voice of his gets irritating after a while, and pairing him with the rather subdued and (in my opinion anyway) boring Dean Martin doesn't help as there's no one around to rein him in.

The story of this film feels like it was thought up five minuted before shooting began. It's the standard "there's a new sheriff in town and some criminals are trying to get rid of him" state of affairs that we've all seen about one hundred times before. However I will give the writers some credit as they did try to add a little twist to it, but ultimately it doesn't work because you don't really care about what's happening.

There's also this weird thing about an inter-generational family war which means that Dean Martin's character (a cowboy) and Jerry Lewis' character (a spoiled socialite who has always dreamed of being a cowboy) have to team up to stop the bad guys who are... doing something bad.

However this just means that it takes about 40 minutes for the two main characters to team up which means the rest of the movie feels incredibly rushed, so I wish they'd structured the movie better in that regard.

Oh yeah, also it's a musical? That was something I only figured out about 30 minutes in, which is when the first musical number appears. I can't actually remember any other songs after that though, so maybe there was only one? Either way, it was unnecessary and pointless and only served to waste time.

Overall, this movie was a pretty big disappointment, but it wasn't completely awful. Hopefully my future attempts to watch some Lewis and Martin will yield greater results.

"Pardners" is one of a slew of comedies that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made together in the early 1950s. Most had two or more songs for which they get dubbed musicals as well. This one is also a Western. The two starts do quite well on horses, and obviously knew they way around Western lore. Of course, Jerry's the center of the comedy here. The two play Slim Mosely and Wade Kingsley - first as senior "pardners" in the West of 1885, and then as juniors of the former pardners.

And of course with these two there must always be one and sometimes two females in the picture. Here it's Lorri Nelson as Carol Kingsley and Jackie Loughery as Dolly Riley. Others in the supporting cast include Agnes Moorehead as Jerry's mom, Mrs. Matilda Kingsley, Lon Chaney Jr. as Whitey and Lee Van Cleef as Gus.

Watching this film these many years later, I could imagine that I might have enjoyed it more for entertainment as a young teenager when I saw it the first time in a theater. Today, it's just okay for an old-timer, but I think one that grandkids might yet enjoy for some of Jerry's slapstick.

After years of just seeing parts of this Martin & Lewis movie, I finally watched the whole thing on YouTube. As you can discern from the title, Dean & Jerry are in the old west. First, as their fathers from the previous century. Then, as their sons with the mother of Lewis (Agnes Moorehead) raising him back in New York to marry some Amazon woman but that son will have none of it. I'll stop there and just say that while I enjoyed Pardners, I did feel that some of the plot points and characterizations seemed rushed in order to parody certain clichés. Still, Jerry's as funny as he can be doing what he does here and Dean seems quite comfortable in his first of many times he would wear cowboy duds. The leading ladies of Lori Nelson and Jackie Loughery sure look good and nothing more. The villains of Jeff Morrow and John Baragrey provide good enough menace. So on that note, I recommend Pardners. P.S. Despite the team mentioning at the end they plan to stay together in movies for years, by the time this was released in August of '56, they had already done their last performance in tandem the previous month. It would be 20 years before they would publicly reunite on Jerry's telethon with Frank Sinatra doing his bit...