Scared Stiff (1953)

Film: Scared Stiff (1953)
Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Lizabeth Scott, Carmen Miranda, Dorothy Malone (plus two hilarious cameos I won't spoil here, but I do tag below)
Director: George Marshall
Oscar History:  No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Lizabeth Scott-click here to learn more about Ms. Scott (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The career of Lizabeth Scott was incredibly short for a woman that was the lead for 21 of her 22 pictures.  When we think of careers of major stars, they slip quietly into the night, their fame slowly downgraded as they move into lesser and lesser roles/films, eventually getting to play parents and judges and more dismissible parts.  Scott didn't do that.  While she did occasionally make films after her partnership with Hal Wallis (whose obsession with her fueled much of her stardom, though it's kind of distasteful to give him too much of the credit since she was clearly a hit with audiences for a time), Scott's movie star career ended just a few short years after it began, sputtering out in the mid-50's.  Therefore, we're going to end our month-long journey with her penultimate film for Wallis, and her playing weirdly both against-and-within type, as a mysterious, tortured heiress in the middle of a criminal ring...who is aided by the slapstick stylings of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Larry Todd (Martin), a cool lounge singer who is caught romancing a mobster's girlfriend (Malone) and his bumbling best friend, busboy Myron (Lewis).  The two go out on the run with Larry romancing an heiress Mary (Scott) who has just inherited her family's home, a small island off of the coast of Cuba.  The film sets into play a number of hijinks as the trio try to evade the mobsters who are trying to get after Larry & Myron, all the while trying to understand why Mary keeps getting threatening messages to sell her island and not to go there.  We learn soon that the island is haunted, but it's also very much being guarded by someone who has been in plain sight the whole picture, and we get an ending where Mary & Larry get the treasure, and live happily ever after while Myron is left to tag along.

I believe this is the first actual movie of Martin & Lewis I've ever seen, usually only watching their standup acts together or television appearances as themselves.  However, it's not hard to realize that Larry and Myron are pretty disposable as characters, and really they're just playing their big-screen personas here.  Based on a cursory look around the internet, this appears to be one of their best-loved pairings, but I'm not super familiar with the critical consensus on their pictures-if you have thoughts on the best Martin & Lewis movie, I'd be curious to know, as I quite liked their chemistry here.  There's an ease here, and Lewis is hilarious if repetitive, and while some of the jokes are so well-known that they're antiques, you can't hide star charisma, which is what both these men have.  The musical numbers in the film are pretty disposable (there's one where they literally sing the word "enchilada" seemingly a 100 times), but it's pretty fun.  There's also a cameo by Bing Crosby & Bob Hope at the very, very tail of the movie that made me do a spit-take I was so shocked it came out of left field.

Scott, in our final film profiled this month, seems more at ease here than she has in any other role we've seen.  After nearly a decade of playing similarly-designed femme fatales and damsels-in-trouble, it's great to see her play with this character a bit and milk her sturdy delivery and incredible beauty for laughs. It's interesting to see Scott getting to play with this motif a bit, never scoring the biggest laughs (Lewis is there for a reason), but at least having a ball in the picture, against someone like Carmen Miranda, who essentially also plays herself here, in her last role.  Miranda more than almost any other actor in Hollywood's Golden Age, got stuck playing the same character over-and-over again, and it's weird to contradict here Scott, who did get some room to breathe with her character despite as we've seen this month routinely being typecast, and Miranda, who was never given that sort of leverage when she was typecast herself.  Miranda's character feels unfortunately disposable as a result-there's a scene where she's randomly missing for seemingly no reason (other than for Lewis to dress in her famous fruit hat), and then shows up in a future musical number, no questions asked.  Scott at least is afforded more courtesy with her character, and I feel like I leave understanding a bit more of her talents.  Next month we'll investigate a different actress who also got her start in noir, but soon expanded into proper leading lady roles throughout the 1950's...something she'd later regret.