Who’s Minding the Store? Movie Download

6 / 10

A film for those with little tolerance of Jerry Lewis….
Post-Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis films were a mixed bag. You must totally suspend reality to enjoy the somewhat bizarre visual humor Lewis encompasses in his films. This movie is no exception for some of its gags, but for the most part, many of these bits offer genuine laughs.

That future witchy mother-in-law Agnes Moorehead is at her domineering best as department store owner Phoebe Tuttle (even the name is domineering!) as she schemes to keep her beautiful daughter Jill St. John from marrying Lewis, whom Moorehead considers a useless idiot. She has her department store personnel manager Ray Walston hire Lewis and give him the worst jobs possible in hopes of discrediting him with St. John. She doesn’t count on Lewis befriending her milquetoast husband (John McGiver), the in-name only president of the firm, as well as succeeding in many of the tasks and somehow escape the others without quitting and proving her right.

Lewis is an acquired taste, but how can you not laugh at Lewis pretending to type to the popular instrumental ditty “The Typewriter”? He’s also very funny as he finds a way to paint the tip of a 9th story flagpole. Dealing with a lady wrestler (Peggy Mondo) trying to fit into shoes way too small is painfully unfunny as is (sadly) the sequence with the usually delightful Nancy Kulp as a butch big game hunter. Usual Lewis nemesis Kathleen Freeman is wasted as another one of Lewis’s customers in basically a walk-in. (Pardon the pun; Her appearance is in the shoe department.) The three most hysterical sequences involve store products-a golf ball, a small boat and a vacuum cleaner. These are all farcial in presentation and lack the violence of the other sequences mentioned above. Dick Wessel is funny in a recurring gag as a traffic cop who is the unfortunate victim of some of Lewis’s work assignments gone wrong. Walston is appropriately “effette” as Moorehead’s co-conspirator, but it seems odd to giver his character sort of a lothario trait.

St. John has nothing to do but be lovely and noble, so she is upstaged by her on-screen parents McGiver and Moorehead. Each of them offers a lot of laughs, especially Moorehead, who is basically indistinguishable from her portrayal of “Bewitched”‘s Endora. At least viewers in 1964 could see her ravishing red hair several years before “Bewitched” went to color, not to mention the blue eye shadow. Such familiar classic character comics as Fritz Feld, Mary Treen, Isobel Elsom and Milton Frome also appear in nice bits, although Feld’s sequence (as manager of an exotic food shop) is literally, in bad taste.Read More