The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

The Disorderly Orderly (USA, 1964) 90 min color DIR-SCR: Frank Tashlin from a story by Norm Niebmann and Ed Haas. PROD: Paul Jones. MUSIC: Joseph J. Lilley. DOP: W. Wallace Kelley. CAST: Jerry Lewis, Glenda Farrell, Everett Sloane, Karen Sharpe, Kathleen Freeman, Del Moore, Barbara Nichols, Susan Oliver, Mike Mazurki, William Wellman Jr., Francine York, Paul Frees (narrator). (Paramount Pictures)

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ER was never like this! Even when Jerry Lewis was directing his own vehicles (like The Bellboy or The Nutty Professor), his mentor Frank Tashlin would still occasionally direct him. In one of his most enjoyable romps, this brilliantly cartoonish farce features Jerry Lewis once again as one of humankind’s bottom feeders, in the guise of Jerome Littlefield, a bumbling orderly who is turning a hospital into a battleground just by trying to do the right thing. The head nurse, Ms. Howard, laments, “You try too hard. That’s your problem.” Because she has a thing for Jerome’s late father is why she puts up with him at all!

This wonderful nonsense works best when something in the guise of a pesky plot doesn’t rear its head. Clearly Tashlin and star-executive producer Jerry are more interested in cutting loose with a seeming non-stop parade of phantasmagorical humour. Because Tashlin earned his stripes in cartoons, he applies the same kind of surreal world to his live action films. (At one point the film even turns into a musical!) After the doofus Jerome gets outsmarted by the patient he is fitting a straitjacket onto, the bound-up Littlefield is crawling along the sidewalk, and then gets outrun by a passing snail! Best is when a spoiled actress patient (played by dear Barbara Nichols) wants him to fix her TV set because the picture is all snowy; he opens the screen and snowflakes fill the room! Its more “controlled” visual humour is also quite special. In the “quiet area”, two people have a conversation, yet there is no audio. The dialogue is subtitled!

The film cleverly blurs real life and reel life in a scene where Jerome and his girl Julie pass a storefront window, where there is an ad for this very movie… with the star’s name intact! Plus, is the scene where Jerome sings in French a sly reference to his most devoted fanbase?

It may be true that Jerome’s bumbling is turning the place upside down, but the place is no less reciprocal in making his life absolute hell. Almost everyone yells at the top of their lungs- especially Nurse Higgins, played by the bombastic Kathleen Freeman (remember she even beat up The Blues Brothers!), and patients describe their operations in such graphic detail that Jack Nicholson’s character in Little Shop of Horrors would be in ecstasy!

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Even though Jerome has a girlfriend, the kindly soft-spoken brunette Julie (Karen Sharpe), he positively flips for patient Susan Andrews (Susan Oliver), who is a suicide survivor on the road to recovery. Why does he respond to her? Is it only a physical attraction? Does he share her pain? Here is where the central plot kicks in, and the film becomes a Zen calm compared to all that preceded it. This woman becomes a positive model for Jerome as gets less frazzled by his surroundings and gains the confidence to be a doctor. Okay. Now to the climax.

Messrs Tashlin and Lewis send this film out with a bang, where an ambulance chase results in a patient in a stretcher rolling into a supermarket knocking over those six-foot displays of soup cans in the aisle (tell me– have you ever seen a display like this in a supermarket?) and all the customers coming flying out the store wheeling on these cans as though they were rolling logs. Meanwhile, Jerome tries to stop the car, and his foot goes through the floor and he has to brake the vehicle much like Fred Flintstone! This is just as wild as the car chase which closes W.C. Fields’ Never Give A Sucker an Even Break. (Actually, there a couple of nods to comedians of yesteryear- a scene with Jerry’s finger aflame is right out of Laurel and Hardy.)

The Disorderly Orderly is prime Jerry Lewis. Like his self-made vehicles, it is a joyfully surreal romp about the renewal of a first-class loser. But in Lewis’ films as a director, he doesn’t know when to turn it off. When you watch, say, The Family Jewels, you undergo a reel of torture to get to a moment of indisputable brilliance. (That may sum up Godard for some people, too.) This is why, with the possible exception of The Nutty Professor, Tashlin’s films of the era starring Lewis stand up better. In the days before Tim Burton or even Maurizio Nichetti, there was no one like Frank Tashlin who could have turned the real world into a cartoonish playground.

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Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #6, “The Second Annual Summer Drive-In Issue”.