80 Years of Martin and Lewis: Artists and Models (1955)

About 80 Years of Martin and Lewis: Artists and Models (1955)

Artists and Models (1955) is the most acclaimed of Martin and Lewis’s films, and it’s not difficult to see why.

This eye-popping satire of 1960s moral panic follows struggling painter Rick Todd (Martin) and his roommate, comic-book mad aspiring writer Eugene Fullstack (Lewis). On a mission to find success amidst a bloodthirsty comic book boom, Todd draws inspiration from his roommates nightly screaming fits.

Martin and Lewis meet their match alongside powerhouse comic performances from the wonderful Shirley Maclaine (in one of her earliest screen roles) and Dorothy Malone (just one year before her Academy Award winning turn in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind).

Directed by former Looney Tunes cartoonist Frank Tashlin, Artists and Models is jam-packed with visual gags and boundary-pushing innuendo. Lewis thrives under Tashlin’s direction, giving a performance so elastic and extreme that it wouldn’t feel out of place in a Bugs Bunny short.

This film marked the first collaboration of many between Lewis and Tashlin who (beyond his own self-directed oeuvre) quickly became Lewis’s director of choice.

The film will be preceded by an introduction from I’ll Say She Is curator Charlotte Ross.