Wo, bitte, geht's zur Front?

After Which Way To The Front was released Jerry Lewis ceased making films as a star attraction. With a few funny moments involved, there were more eggs laid at this film than a chicken farm on a slow day. It's not a horrible film but it's definitely not among Lewis's best and in the lower tier of his work.

Jerry plays one of the richest men in the world who for some reason I can't fathom wants to serve in the ranks. So it rankles him that he's declared a 4-F something around the time that this film came out many young men would have sold their souls for. As he and three fellow 4-Fs Jan Murray, Steven Franken, and Dack Rambo sit and commiserate about their fate Lewis has a brainstorm. He's rich enough, he'll form his own army and equip it. I will say he designs some snazzy uniforms for his troops which also include his butler John Wood and his chauffeur Willie Davis of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Those flashback sequences involving Murray, Rambo, and Franken are the best part of the film. Even for an audience in the middle of the Vietnam War, those guys all have excellent reasons for wanting to leave their current situations.

Unfortunately the rest of the film isn't as good. The guys train on Lewis's palatial estates, get the best chow any army ever had and then decide on their own mission which is based on Jerry Lewis's resemblance to Field Marshal Kesselring. If you believe their account they actually break the stalemate on the Italian front and later participate in the bomb plot against Hitler.

Hitler was played by Sidney Miller and his scenes with Lewis as Kesselring are taken straight from The Great Dictator. I'm not sure Charlie Chaplin really liked this particular homage.

A lot of World War II film clichés are dealt with here. The coda to this film with Lewis impersonating one of those bucktooth Japanese that were popular at the time I'm not sure was really needed. Nor was it all that funny.

Jerry came up short with this film.

The idea of a rich man, rejected by the army as 4F, then creating his own military experience, has possibilities. It could be a funny movie.

This wasn't. Lewis' vision of the comic bits has no sense of timing. It moves along at a snail's pace, and includes myriad supporting scenes that just aren't funny. Each scene has a punch line, but most of them were a waste of film. Evidently, firing a mortar and then blandly declaring "We just blew up a Texaco station" just doesn't pack the comedic punch it used to.

Jerry stammering gibberish was barely tolerable in his early days. In this film, it just looks tired.

While the film is set in 1943, hair styles, colloquial expressions, mores, costuming, and just about everything else are firmly rooted in the late 60s.

To get picky, the freeze frame method of ending scenes, as used in this film, is just odd.

I actually got pained looks from my wife when I held on past the first twenty minutes hoping that it would eventually get to the "good part". Twenty-two minutes after that I finally gave in and stopped watching this mess.

So, maybe it's because of my age (28), but I can't laugh at this type of humor. For my it's old fashioned, with lame jokes and an excessive physical humor. I respect Jerry Lewis and his contribution to cinema, he was in many ways a visionary. I also don't like modern days comedies, so, maybe I'm the problem.

The idea behind "Which Way to the Front" - a millionaire rejected for military service during World War II deciding to form his own army platoon and fight the war his way - is definitely one that is original and has a lot of potential for humor. Unfortunately, the execution here is lacking, to put it kindly. Watching it, I often got the feeling that star and director Jerry Lewis was not trying very hard. For example, while the movie is set in 1943, the movie has a very 1970s feel to it from the costumes to the sets.

A bigger problem is that the movie is simply not that funny, especially in the first half. The movie starts off very slowly, taking both forever to set the situation up and then to get Lewis and his team into the field. And while this is going on, one attempted gag after the other lands with a thud.

The second half of the movie is a bit more successful. There is an injection of serious energy by both Lewis the star and Lewis the director. And this energy does end up generating a few (mild) giggles. (But I certainly didn't laugh at the offensive last scene; you'll see for yourself when you watch the movie.) While there are worse comedies out there (both with or without Lewis), it's easy to see why Warner Brothers only gave the movie a limited release in North America. Though the movie did extremely well in a number of foreign countries, suggesting there's an audience for just about any movie.

I clearly remember being bereft at the age of about 10 when I read that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were splitting up. I think it was my first lesson in the world being cruel, I was truly shocked at that age as these were my comedy heroes. They'd had a string of hits finishing with Pardners and Hollywood or Bust and I just couldn't conceive of a world without Martin & Lewis. Jerry went on to make many comedies which got great acceptance as I remember in Europe, but not so much in the USA. He was regarded as a kind of modern day Chaplin and an acquired taste, mainly due to his obstinance in doing his own thing. This fortunately came to a head with the original Nutty Professor, a truly great comedy. I wish he'd left it there as Which Way To The Front, which I've just viewed is dreadful. An awful script, let down by amateur acting from the so called comedic actors supporting him, a ghastly performance by Jerry himself, screaming for most of it, and in this day and age, politically incorrect to the extreme. I smiled in two or three places and that was it. Best to avoid unless like me, you're a Jerry Lewis completist and just had to watch to the end. It seemed about as long as the second world war in which it was set.