Artists and Models (1955)

Director:

Frank Tashlin

Writers:

Herbert Baker (writer)
Michael Davidson (story)

Release Date:

7 November 1955 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Musical

Plot:

Rick Todd uses the dreams of his roommate Eugene as the basis fir a successful comic book.

Plot Keywords:

Comic Book | Dream | Artist | Roommate | Nightmare

Cast

Dean Martin	...	Rick Todd
Jerry Lewis	...	Eugene Fullstack
Shirley MacLaine	...	Bessie Sparrowbrush
Dorothy Malone	...	Abigail 'Abby' Parker
Eddie Mayehoff	...	Mr. Murdock
Eva Gabor	...	Sonia / Mrs. Curtis
Anita Ekberg	...	Anita
George Winslow	...	Richard Stilton (as George 'Foghorn' Winslow')
Jack Elam	...	Ivan
Herbert Rudley	...	Secret Service Chief Samuels
Richard Shannon	...	Secret Service Agent Rogers
Richard Webb	...	Secret Service Agent Peters
Alan Lee	...	Otto
Otto Waldis	...	Kurt

Runtime:

109 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

Finland:S | USA:Unrated | Sweden:Btl

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

Rick Todd's home town is mentioned as Steubendale. Dean Martin's real life birthplace is Steubenville, Ohio.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Rick is painting the lips on the billboard, he looks down to answer his boss, and when he looks back the lips are fully painted.

Quotes:

Mr. Murdock: Sixty-two pages of drawings and no blood? Not even an itsy-bitsy nosebleed? But suffering catfish, do you call this a Murdock Book for Kiddies with no stranglings, with no decapitations? Where are they?

Movie Connections:

Featured in "The Colgate Comedy Hour: (#6.11)" (1955)

Soundtrack:

Artists and Models

Dino Puts Jerry On Canvas

One of the best of the Martin&Lewis films is Artists And Models where Dean and Jerry play a pair of roommates. Dino is a struggling artist and Jerry just struggles.

Jerry also dreams out loud and his wild imaginings in the arms of Morbeus give Dean an idea for comic strip characters which he draws. It makes them both quite successful. When they accidentally print the part of a secret rocket formula that is destined to launch a proposed space station into orbit, he arouses both the interest of our Secret Service and the Russians. They send a beautiful spy in the person of Eva Gabor and her scenes trying to vamp Jerry are a scream.

Two things struck me about Artists And Models. One was that Dino seemed less abusive of Jerry in the relationship. It was something different coming out of the pair. Secondly Paramount hired songwriters Harry Warren and Jack Brooks to write a really outstanding score for Dean to sing, one of the best in a Martin&Lewis film. In fact I'm surprised that such songs like Innamorata, When You Pretend, You Look So Familiar, and The Lucky Song, that not one of them merited an Oscar nomination. All are very big favorites with Dean Martin's legion of fans. The team of Warren and Brooks was responsible for Dino's biggest hit from a motion picture, That's Amore.

Jerry occasionally gets a girl as well in some of their films and in this one he got Shirley MacLaine who was doing just her second film, having made her debut in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry also done at Paramount. She also gets to vamp Jerry with a hysterical obbligato of Innamorata. She proves his equal in the mugging department, no mean feat.

In fact the film is populated with beautiful women besides MacLaine and Gabor, Anita Ekberg is also a model and Dorothy Malone is an artist who rooms with MacLaine and has a relationship roughly parallel. Malone looks a whole lot like Jeanne Martin in my humble opinion and in the Nick Tosches biography of Dean Martin, she speaks warmly about working with him in a couple of films, saying he was one of the easiest going people to work with and in fact on another film, helped her over a rough patch because Malone had just lost a brother.

Artists And Models shows Dean and Jerry at their best and musically it might just be the best of the scores Dean Martin ever got in any of his films.