With the film's credits coming 18 minutes into the movie, this World War II comedy has a very strange opening. At any rate, it's a very unfunny comedy where Jerry Lewis hams it up at the expense of everybody else on screen, looking very bizarre with an awful goatee and an even worse fake German accent. He's one of a group of men who, rejected by the military, goes undercover to help in the war efforts, and with his character being so stupid, the American Army should have captured him and had him thought immediately for threatening the outcome of the war. Jan Murray, Dack Rambo and Steve Franken are the others rejected who joins forces with him, but the screenplay treats them shabbily at the expense of giving them little to do or creating strongly written characters.
When you have funny people like Kathleen Freeman, Bubba Lewis and Kay Ballard and they don't get anything good to do, you know something is wrong. At least they use some interesting looking sets, but that doesn't add laughs. This has to be one of the worst comedies about World War II ever written, painful 95% of the time and practically unwatchable outside of the wasted supporting cast. It's easy to see why this became the last original Jerry Lewis movie for a decade, not that he had had many good films in the past few years anyway. With his constant yelling, Lewis managed to give everybody in the theater audience a headache and it's surprising that the theater didn't offer aspirin instead of popcorn.
When you have funny people like Kathleen Freeman, Bubba Lewis and Kay Ballard and they don't get anything good to do, you know something is wrong. At least they use some interesting looking sets, but that doesn't add laughs. This has to be one of the worst comedies about World War II ever written, painful 95% of the time and practically unwatchable outside of the wasted supporting cast. It's easy to see why this became the last original Jerry Lewis movie for a decade, not that he had had many good films in the past few years anyway. With his constant yelling, Lewis managed to give everybody in the theater audience a headache and it's surprising that the theater didn't offer aspirin instead of popcorn.