80 Years of Martin and Lewis: Hollywood or Bust (1956)

About 80 Years of Martin and Lewis: Hollywood or Bust (1956)

Martin and Lewis’s final film is also one of their funniest. Released six months after their infamous split, Hollywood or Bust (1956) marked their second collaboration with Cahiers-darling Frank Tashlin.

Lewis plays crazed cinephile Malcolm Smith who, after winning a shiny new car at a raffle, plans to drive to Hollywood to meet his beloved Anita Ekberg. When con artist Steve Wiley (Martin) claims the prize with a forged ticket, naive Malcolm is thrilled to have gained both a car and a friend. But as the pair set off for Hollywood, Steve bends over backwards to rid himself of his irritating new companion.

Even for those unfamiliar with Lewis’s work, his well-known (and oft-derided) acclaim in France endures. It was through this collaboration with Tashlin that Lewis first caught the attention of the French auteurists. Writing in Cahiers du Cinéma in July 1957, Jean-Luc Godard remarked:

“Frank Tashlin has not renovated the Hollywood comedy. He has done better. There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust and It Happened One Night, but a difference in kind. Tashlin, in other words, has not renewed but created. And henceforth, when you talk about a comedy, don’t say ‘It’s Chaplinesque’; say, loud and clear, ‘‘It’s Tashlinesque’.“

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