The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
Living It Up (1954)
Directed by Norman Taurog
On March 16th, Jerry Lewis will turn ninety years old. The American entertainer rose to fame as half of Martin and Lewis, the variety team that he co-founded with Dean Martin in 1946. Their wildly popular music-and-comedy duo (with Martin assaying the role of crooning suave straight man and Lewis that of whirlwind childlike Id) made great success across nightclub stages, radio platforms, television studios, and cinema screens for a decade before the pair split up to pursue solo careers. Living It Up is a musical spin on the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred that features Jerry in the Carole Lombard role of a poor rural soul who the whole world thinks is poisoned with only a few weeks left to live—the whole world, that is, save for the fellow and his loping, lovelorn doctor (played by Dean), who knows him to be in perfect health. When a lovely newspaper reporter (Janet Leigh) offers them an all-expenses-paid trip to Manhattan for her to cover the condemned man’s last days, though, the two men decide to keep up the ruse. They strain and strive to fool everyone they meet, and sing and dance their way into and out of trouble, while both the girl and her Big Apple prove increasingly hard for them to resist. Aaron Cutler (March 3, 4pm; March 10, 7pm at MoMA’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. Lewis”)