Product Description

As a result of his severe clumsiness and goofy demeanor, Littlefield fits right in with the patients, and is often mistaken for them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36435 in DVD
• Brand: Paramount
• Released on: 2004-10-12
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 89 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
The hugely successful collaboration between Jerry Lewis and director Frank Tashlin (including Artists and Models and The Geisha Boy) came to an end with this knockabout hospital comedy, which contains a raft of Tashlin's patented sight gags. Jerry plays an orderly with a strange fixation on a depressed patient (Susan Oliver), but the point of the movie is watching Lewis wrestle with laundry bags or contorting with agony as he empathizes with the intestinal maladies of patients. This is one of Lewis's funniest movies for babbling, too ("Oh, friction--burning"). Meanwhile, Tashlin brings his cartoon sensibility to freestanding bits, such as the montage of wind chimes that ends with a skeleton chattering in the breeze, or the inordinately loud crunch of an apple in a hospital quiet zone. All in all, a good laugh-per-minute ratio in the slapstick realm. Plus Sammy Davis Jr. sings the title song, a weirdly Rat Packish number. --Robert Horton

DVD features
A small collection of outtakes includes a nice glimpse of Jerry Lewis playing pranks on his director, Frank Tashlin, while shooting a scene with a laundry cart--you can sense Lewis's comic ingenuity as well as his urgent need to make people laugh. No commentary track. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Laughter Is The Best Medicine!
Jerry Lewis is Jerome Littlefield, an orderly at a mental institution who acts crazier than the patients. Since Frank Tashlin directed this movie, Jerry is free to concentrate solely on his performance, which he does to perfection. Once again Jerry is the lovable loser, who was thrown out of medical school because he felt the symptoms of every patient he diagnosed. This movie features a lot of great sight gags. Jerry fixes a television set in a patient's room that has poor reception, also known as snow. When he takes out the front of the TV, snow comes flying out of the set and soon fills the room! A patient is in a full body cast from head to toe, looking like a plastered mummy. Jerry accidentally knocks him over, the patient goes rolling down a hill and crashes into a tree. There's pieces of broken plaster everywhere, but no body! Jerry declares, "I lost a patient!" The movie concludes with one of the craziest chase scenes in movie history, as a wheeled stretcher with an injured man on it rolls out of the back of an ambulance and continues to roll down hills, while first one, then two ambulances chase him. This movie features more LPMs (laughs per minute) than most modern comedies, and is one of Jerry's funniest films.

superb
I loved this when I was a kid and I'm glad to say I still do now at 42! This is one of Jerry Lewis's finest with some really clever visual gags and an inspired use of sound(look out for the apple scene.)Kathleen Freeman is also great as the long suffering head nurse.The whole cast is excellent really and Everett Sloane is on fine form as the very un-pc director of the hospital.
A great film and very nearly up there with Lewis's(not Eddie Murphy's!) The Nutty Professor.

You'll need pain relief from laughing so much.
Funny, funny, funny. Great family movie. Too bad they don't make them like this anylonger.