Title: Artists and Models
Year: 1955
Director: Frank Tashlin
Writers: Frank Tashlin, Hal Kanter, Herbert Baker and Don McGuire, based by the play by Michael Davidson and Norman Lessing. Whew!
Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone

The Story: Jerry’s brain has been addled by too many “Bat Lady” comic books and now he babbles wild stories in his sleep. Dino uses those stories to take over as the new writer-artist of the comic-book, but this leads to mix-ups with Malone and MacLaine, the original artist and her model.

Why It’s Great: If this is first movie you’ve seen from Lewis’s heyday, you may fear that he’ll be a little over the top. And you’d be right. At times, he can be broader than the broadest Jerry Lewis imitation, but Martin has enough preternatural cool for both of them. They’re not attempting to play human beings at all—Martin is the ultimate dream of who we want to be and Lewis personifies our worst fears about how the world perceives us. This satire of the 1950s comic industry is wickedly sharp. Malone’s publisher craves sensation: “62 pages of drawings and no blood? Not even an itsy-bitsy nose bleed? Suffering catfish, do you call this a book for kiddies? With no stranglings? No decapitations?” There’s even a psychologist character who’s clearly based on Frederick Wertham, author of the infamous comic-book expose “Seduction of the Innocent.” This is a lot of the same material that has shown up recently in acclaimed books like “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Ten Cent Plague” but here they are satirizing both sides in real time, as it all happened!

Two more reasons over at Cockeyed Caravan.