There may be times in one’s life when you realize some sort of sea change has happened to your psyche. Maybe you find religion after a lifetime without it, or perhaps you part ways with a spiritual belief system with which you have been associated your entire life. Or maybe you suddenly realize your sexual orientation is not what you and others believed it to be.
As for myself, a recent seismic shift in my brain was brought about by a viewing of 1962’s It’s Only Money. I realized with creeping horror that my enjoyment of The Nutty Professor might have not been a fluke. God forbid, I might be turning into a Jerry Lewis fan. Not unlike somebody who realizes with dawning terror they have developed a passion for Dungeons & Dragons, I wondered if I would ever have sex again.
Fortunately for me, my wife also laughed a great deal at Lewis’s antics here. One thing which helps is sheer volume of jokes hurled at the viewer. An example is the avalanche of titles of his favorite detective novels, which he delivers in a manner akin to drinking from a fire hose. I’m sure I didn’t catch most of them, but I recall The Haunted Fallout Shelter and The Case of the Homicidal Homing Pigeon.
This time around, Lewis is a TV repairman with a natural affinity for working with electronics. As he tells it, his interest began when he was young and he stuck his finger in an electrical outlet. It also cured him of his thumb-sucking.
But what he really aspires to be is a private detective, which is why he is so excited to have as a customer a shamus played by Jesse White. White is determined to find the missing heir of the recently deceased founder of television, so as to receive the large reward being offered by their estate. Lewis worms his way into assisting the P.I. in this investigation when, of course, he is that heir, unbeknownst to himself.
Their investigation gets them into the family mansion in which resides Mae Questel as the niece Lewis’s orphan never knew he had. She is the fiancée of family lawyer Zachary Scott, and his mixing of business and pleasure tells you all you need to know about his character and their motivations. Jack Weston is the family butler when he’s not attempting murders for Scott, as part of the plan to keep a true heir to the fortune from being uncovered. Rounding out the cast is Joan O’Brien as Questel’s live-nurse and inevitable love interest for Lewis.
Everybody is game here for what is a seriously lightweight entertainment. Weston, in particular, relishes his part with murderous glee. O’Brien is in a thankless role and all I can really remember of her after the fact was my speculation whether she ever woke up in the morning and mistook herself for Kim Novak. Questel, however, is the secret star of the picture and steals the scenes she’s in, courtesy of her effervescent and carefree manner. This is a person who knows who she is and what she wants, and it is a character I wish we had spent more time with.
It is no surprise the majority of that time is spent with Lewis, and your enjoyment of this film will largely depend upon your tolerance for him. While I have only dipped a toe into his filmography, it is my understanding he is rather more restrained here and in Professor than in most of the other pictures from his prime era. Still, he is a force of nature, running around like a live-action cartoon character and basically anticipating everything Jim Carrey would do in his 90s comedies. He even hangs from the ceiling at one point, telling White to grab his legs and “bring my body…it’s all connected”.
But there are also traces of what I have heard are the worst aspects of the actor’s personality. His vanity shows in his questionable choice to have his character be 25, when he was actually 36. His arrogance is evident through the posters for three of his other films pasted on the wall outside his TV repair shop. His notorious deep well of anger adds an odd undercurrent to some of his more manic bits, putting a curious edge on what should be pure comedy.
That It’s Only Money is shot in black and white was a curious and bold movie for a comedy made at a time when the movies were so desperately trying to distinguish themselves from television. Heck, director Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It opened with a sequence emphasizing the advantages of that medium over the other.
While the studios underestimated the threat posed by the small screen, this Lewis film is prescient in a couple of other ways. One is an automated vacuum cleaner that foretells the Roomba, including the way it just gets stuck in one place as it aggressively cleans just one small patch of carpet. The other is the demonstration of a record of train sounds played through a sound system so state-of-the-art that Lewis finds himself moved around in his chair while surrounded by smoke. I’m startled a 1962 movie could foresee a desperate move by theatres to get butts in seats in 2024: the 4D experience.
Dir: Frank Tashlin
Starring Jerry Lewis, Joan O’Brien, Zachary Scott
Watched on Signal One Entertainment UK blu-ray (region B)