80 Years of Martin and Lewis: You’re Never Too Young (1954)

About 80 Years of Martin and Lewis: You’re Never Too Young (1954)

A gender-swapped remake of Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor, this lush Technicolor vehicle combines such ludicrously cartoonish plot elements as jet-ski chase sequences, forced cigar eating, and show-stopping dance numbers. It centres on an aspiring barber (Lewis) who, mistakenly finding himself in possession of a stolen diamond, goes on the run under the assumed identity of an 11-year-old boy. When his disguise attracts the affection of a beautiful teacher (Diana Lynn) he grows determined to maintain the masquerade as long as he can. That is, until her boyfriend (Martin) arrives on the scene and proceeds to increasingly absurd comic lengths to expose his secret.

The Cahiers Du Cinema critics who famously lauded Lewis’ work in the sixties retrospectively identified You’re Never Too Young as early evidence of Lewis’s emergence as an auteur. The film also anticipates the eye-poppingly animated style largely attributed to Lewis’ collaborations with Frank Tashlin in the late fifties and early sixties.

The film will be preceded by an introduction reflecting on Martin and Lewis’s feud and break-up.