Boeing, Boeing

Boeing Boeing is known primarily today as the film where Jerry Lewis stepped out of his schnook character and played a lead role in a Sixties sex comedy. Jerry does all right in expanding his range on this one, but the whole thing itself is not the greatest these type of films ever.

It's more of a warmed over version of The Tender Trap than anything else with Lewis playing not quite so second a banana to Tony Curtis as David Wayne did with Frank Sinatra.

Curtis has a great little operation going over at his place, he's got three fiancés, all airline stewardesses working at different airlines who live at his rather sumptuous bachelor pad in Paris. He keeps complete track of the schedule of Dany Saval for Air France, Christine Schmidtmer for Lufthansa, and Susanna Leigh for British Airways. But one fine day schedules change. Not only that, but an old rival Jerry Lewis comes into town and watches in amazement.

I'm still trying to figure out just how Tony Curtis could afford the living quarters he was in together with live-in maid Thelma Ritter who helps him keep the pretenses up. Just how a Jewish maid from Queens got to be living in Paris is also a mystery. All this mind you is on a reporter's salary and no one said that Curtis was Carl Bernstein.

Good thing he could afford her because Thelma Ritter as usual is the best thing in the film despite the statuesque proportions of the ladies involved. Especially Schmidtmer as Ritter caustically commented.

In his memoirs Tony Curtis says he liked making Boeing Boeing and thinks highly of Jerry Lewis as a person and comedian. He also said Lewis even when not doing his usual shtick in a film was still the greatest scene stealer on the planet with whom he had to stay constantly alert.

It's not a bad comedy, some will find it incredibly sexist for their taste. It does suffer by comparison to The Tender Trap.