ARTISTS AND MODELS
Tit. it.: “Artisti e modelle”; Scen.: Frank Tashlin, Hal Kanter, Herbert Baker, da una commedia di Michael Davidson e Norman Lessing; F.: Daniel L. Fapp; M.: Warren Low; Scgf.: Hal Pereira, Tambi Larsen; Cost.: Edith Head; Trucco: Wally Westmore; Mu.: Jack Brooks, Harry Warren; Arrangiamenti: Walter Scharf; Coreografie: Charles O’Curran; Su.: Hugo Grenzbach, Gene Garvin; Effetti speciali: John P. Fulton; Ass.R.: Charles C. Coleman, Jr.; Int.: Dean Martin (Rick Todd), Jerry Lewis (Eugene Fullstack), Shirley MacLaine (Bessie Sparrowbush), Dorothy Malone (Abigail Parker), Eddie Mayehoff (Mr. Murdock), Eva Gabor (Sonia), Anita Ekberg (Anita), George “Foghorn” Winslow (Richard Stilton), Jack Elam (Ivan), Herbert Rudley (capo dei servizi segreti Samuels), Richard Shannon (agente dei servizi segreti Rogers), Richard Webb (agente dei servizi segreti Peters), Alan Lee (Otto), Otto Waldis (Kurt); Prod.: Hal B. Wallis per Paramount 35mm. D.: 109’. Col.
Film Notes
In Tashlin’s hands VistaVision was like a surgical instrument at the service of his dissection of contemporary living standards. Behind the hyperrealism and the crazily disparate elements, he successfully portrayed the comically repressed state in which human beings reduced to consumer automatons are forced to live. There was a sense of terror at the machinery of mass communication, viewed directly, without the critical distance that characterized, say, Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. The centerpiece of this tender yet devastating universe is Artists and Models, Tashlin’s first VistaVision film, starring the maître fou of modern civilisation, Jerry Lewis, who was capable of producing absurd gags non-stop, violent plots and dream-like figures such as Vincent, the “half man, half boy, half bird”.
Peter von Bagh in “Cinegrafie”, 17, 2004