“He’s admired as a comedian, but an awful lot of Americans are in the dark as to what’s so… almost sanctified by Europeans, particularly the French, as a filmmaker,” said Cavett. This was no mere urban legend. A reliable box-office draw in France throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Lewis-as-auteur was also a subject that united the warring factions of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. That Godard admired Lewis shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who pays attention to their work. Both began their directorial careers in 1960 with modestly budgeted, black-and-white films with great improvisatory energy set in found locations (Godard shot Breathless on the streets of Paris; Lewis made The Bellboy in his off hours while gigging at a Florida hotel), and both displayed a playful restlessness with the conventions of film form, experimenting freely with cinematic sound, space, design, and narrative. But to American critics and audiences who wrote Lewis off as a kids’ menu item since shortly after his 1956 breakup with Dean Martin, Lewis’s overseas reputation became the quintessential example of French perversity and pseudo-intellectualism, enduring long enough to inspire “Weird Al” Yankovic to sing of being a “Genius in France” as late as 2002.
Cavett asks the question with a smile, as if to nudge the audience. Admirably, Godard takes it seriously. After reminding Cavett that he and his Cahiers compatriots also elevated Hitchcock, Hawks, and Ford, Godard goes on to praise Lewis’s command of the cinematic frame (“He’s more a painter, really, than a director”) and lament that his new film, Hardly Working (1980), was still unreleased in the United States. “The title is very honest. It’s difficult to make a good picture and he knows,” says Godard. “Do you also find him funny?” asks Cavett. “Very,” replies Godard. “Even when it’s not funny, it’s more funny” (here, finally, Godard allows himself a smile).
"That Godard admired Lewis shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who pays attention to their work."
In 1980, both Godard and Lewis were coming out of what were widely perceived as “wilderness periods.” For Godard, the ‘70s were actually a time of extraordinary productivity: first the Marxist tracts with Jean-Pierre Gorin, then the innovative video work with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he relocated to Switzerland. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, this period carries with it a certain whiff of failure. With Gorin, Godard sought to use cinema in a new way that would shock audiences out of their complacency and inspire revolutionary change, and whatever you think of these films (for the record, I find them some combination of admirable, interesting, and frustrating), the cold reality is that they preached to a very small choir. Godard may have left the mainstream, but Lewis simply wore out his welcome. After struggling to adapt to changing audience tastes in the late ‘60s, and after the professional Waterloo of The Day the Clown Cried in 1972, he spent the ‘70s tending to his annual telethon, battling a Percodan addiction, and paying his bills through countless TV and live appearances.
With Every Man for Himself, Godard was greeted like a prodigal son returned. Boasting three big stars (Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye), the film premiered at Cannes, enjoyed box office success in France, and was a big enough deal to land Godard on an American late-night show. But elements of the film’s critical reception hinted at a sense of disenchantment that would continue to dog Godard’s mainstream critical reputation. Roger Ebert said on his TV show, “It’s Godard doing what he used to do and not doing it in any new way or with any new subjects”—a puzzlingly inaccurate statement, but one that suggests Ebert was chafing against the film’s weary tone compared to Godard’s euphoric ’60s work. Pauline Kael was more precise, if also ungenerous, when she wrote, “Godard's political extremism has been replaced by a broader extremism—total contempt, colored by masochism. He's saying, ‘Everything is for sale.’ It's simplistic cynicism, like that of the barroom pundit who tells you that every man has his price.”
The story follows three interconnected characters, each stuck in a rut, each trying to get out: a depressed director named “Paul Godard” (Dutronc), who makes films because he knows no other way of living; his estranged girlfriend Denise (Baye), attempting to create a life apart from Paul; and Isabelle (Huppert), a sex worker trying to save enough to buy her independence. Nobody cracks a smile, least of all Isabelle, whose body is treated like cattle in scenes that introduce a new sexual frankness for Godard. Explicit, unromantic sexuality is one of several motifs introduced here that would mark Godard’s ‘80s work, including a dichotomy between the country (good) and city (bad); Godard surrogates (often played by Godard himself) who exist in a state of personal and artistic ruin; and handsome, naturally lit 35mm photography that is beautiful without being pretty. Though still deeply engaged with the medium and its possibilities (the film makes neat use of slow-motion photography and layered sound design), Godard is no longer bursting with cinephilia per se. He’s still deeply political, but no longer in a capital-P sense. As the English title implies, Godard now thinks that liberation is something we can only try (and usually fail) to find for ourselves.
"In Hardly Working, the supporting actors yell and mug like the Lewis co-stars of yore, but instead of a Hollywood studio dreamworld, they’re surrounded by the suburbs and disused warehouses of Fort Lauderdale, Florida."
Made with independent financing far from Hollywood, Hardly Working had to become a blockbuster in Europe before an American studio finally bought it. Stateside critical reaction was almost uniformly hostile, save for Jonathan Rosenbaum, who called it “a key document of the Reagan era” and found poignancy in the star’s diminished virtuosity (“Jerry Lewis is America, and both are hardly working”). The film benefits from being viewed through this lens. The U.S. theatrical cut opens with a montage of scenes from Lewis’s classic films; clearly meant to reintroduce the star to his public, the montage actually underlines the difference between then and now. Fifty-three at the time of filming, Lewis is a heavier presence in both body and soul than the manic, twig-thin boy of 20 years before. In Hardly Working, the supporting actors yell and mug like the Lewis co-stars of yore, but instead of a Hollywood studio dreamworld, they’re surrounded by the suburbs and disused warehouses of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
For Lewis, nothing is sadder than a sad clown. In Hardly Working, that clown is Bo Hooper, who loses his job when a bank forecloses on his circus. It seems there’s no more room in this world for laughter, and Bo is suffering an identity crisis. For years, he was content with an itinerant existence, but that has finally changed: “I want what I never realized I wanted: to be somebody. Not just anybody, but somebody—with a direction and a purpose.” After cycling unsuccessfully through jobs, Bo finds steady work as a mailman—and, after a period of shenanigans and hijinks, finally becomes a model employee. But in the climactic scene, for reasons the film never entirely explains, Bo delivers his rounds dressed in full clown makeup, surrounded by dozens of happy children and passersby. His flummoxed boss fires him on the spot. In the postscript, we find Bo hitchhiking to clown college. After 90 minutes of its protagonist trying to conform to the adult world, the end of Hardly Working feels like a belated, poignant rebuke.
Hardly Working was a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but Lewis directed only one more low-budget production (1983’s Cracking Up) before his film career more-or-less ended. Godard continued to work prolifically until his death in 2022, never again to a large audience, and always against a low-level critical backlash for abandoning the pleasures he conjured in his great ‘60s work. In 1980, both delivered the best kind of “return to form”—ones that acknowledge that the form, like the past, can never be recaptured. Nobody remains the man of the moment forever, but the greatest artists can survive outside of time.
“He’s admired as a comedian, but an awful lot of Americans are in the dark as to what’s so… almost sanctified by Europeans, particularly the French, as a filmmaker,” said Cavett. This was no mere urban legend. A reliable box-office draw in France throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Lewis-as-auteur was also a subject that united the warring factions of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. That Godard admired Lewis shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who pays attention to their work. Both began their directorial careers in 1960 with modestly budgeted, black-and-white films with great improvisatory energy set in found locations (Godard shot Breathless on the streets of Paris; Lewis made The Bellboy in his off hours while gigging at a Florida hotel), and both displayed a playful restlessness with the conventions of film form, experimenting freely with cinematic sound, space, design, and narrative. But to American critics and audiences who wrote Lewis off as a kids’ menu item since shortly after his 1956 breakup with Dean Martin, Lewis’s overseas reputation became the quintessential example of French perversity and pseudo-intellectualism, enduring long enough to inspire “Weird Al” Yankovic to sing of being a “Genius in France” as late as 2002.
Cavett asks the question with a smile, as if to nudge the audience. Admirably, Godard takes it seriously. After reminding Cavett that he and his Cahiers compatriots also elevated Hitchcock, Hawks, and Ford, Godard goes on to praise Lewis’s command of the cinematic frame (“He’s more a painter, really, than a director”) and lament that his new film, Hardly Working (1980), was still unreleased in the United States. “The title is very honest. It’s difficult to make a good picture and he knows,” says Godard. “Do you also find him funny?” asks Cavett. “Very,” replies Godard. “Even when it’s not funny, it’s more funny” (here, finally, Godard allows himself a smile).
"That Godard admired Lewis shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who pays attention to their work."
In 1980, both Godard and Lewis were coming out of what were widely perceived as “wilderness periods.” For Godard, the ‘70s were actually a time of extraordinary productivity: first the Marxist tracts with Jean-Pierre Gorin, then the innovative video work with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he relocated to Switzerland. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination, this period carries with it a certain whiff of failure. With Gorin, Godard sought to use cinema in a new way that would shock audiences out of their complacency and inspire revolutionary change, and whatever you think of these films (for the record, I find them some combination of admirable, interesting, and frustrating), the cold reality is that they preached to a very small choir. Godard may have left the mainstream, but Lewis simply wore out his welcome. After struggling to adapt to changing audience tastes in the late ‘60s, and after the professional Waterloo of The Day the Clown Cried in 1972, he spent the ‘70s tending to his annual telethon, battling a Percodan addiction, and paying his bills through countless TV and live appearances.
With Every Man for Himself, Godard was greeted like a prodigal son returned. Boasting three big stars (Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye), the film premiered at Cannes, enjoyed box office success in France, and was a big enough deal to land Godard on an American late-night show. But elements of the film’s critical reception hinted at a sense of disenchantment that would continue to dog Godard’s mainstream critical reputation. Roger Ebert said on his TV show, “It’s Godard doing what he used to do and not doing it in any new way or with any new subjects”—a puzzlingly inaccurate statement, but one that suggests Ebert was chafing against the film’s weary tone compared to Godard’s euphoric ’60s work. Pauline Kael was more precise, if also ungenerous, when she wrote, “Godard's political extremism has been replaced by a broader extremism—total contempt, colored by masochism. He's saying, ‘Everything is for sale.’ It's simplistic cynicism, like that of the barroom pundit who tells you that every man has his price.”
The story follows three interconnected characters, each stuck in a rut, each trying to get out: a depressed director named “Paul Godard” (Dutronc), who makes films because he knows no other way of living; his estranged girlfriend Denise (Baye), attempting to create a life apart from Paul; and Isabelle (Huppert), a sex worker trying to save enough to buy her independence. Nobody cracks a smile, least of all Isabelle, whose body is treated like cattle in scenes that introduce a new sexual frankness for Godard. Explicit, unromantic sexuality is one of several motifs introduced here that would mark Godard’s ‘80s work, including a dichotomy between the country (good) and city (bad); Godard surrogates (often played by Godard himself) who exist in a state of personal and artistic ruin; and handsome, naturally lit 35mm photography that is beautiful without being pretty. Though still deeply engaged with the medium and its possibilities (the film makes neat use of slow-motion photography and layered sound design), Godard is no longer bursting with cinephilia per se. He’s still deeply political, but no longer in a capital-P sense. As the English title implies, Godard now thinks that liberation is something we can only try (and usually fail) to find for ourselves.
"In Hardly Working, the supporting actors yell and mug like the Lewis co-stars of yore, but instead of a Hollywood studio dreamworld, they’re surrounded by the suburbs and disused warehouses of Fort Lauderdale, Florida."
Made with independent financing far from Hollywood, Hardly Working had to become a blockbuster in Europe before an American studio finally bought it. Stateside critical reaction was almost uniformly hostile, save for Jonathan Rosenbaum, who called it “a key document of the Reagan era” and found poignancy in the star’s diminished virtuosity (“Jerry Lewis is America, and both are hardly working”). The film benefits from being viewed through this lens. The U.S. theatrical cut opens with a montage of scenes from Lewis’s classic films; clearly meant to reintroduce the star to his public, the montage actually underlines the difference between then and now. Fifty-three at the time of filming, Lewis is a heavier presence in both body and soul than the manic, twig-thin boy of 20 years before. In Hardly Working, the supporting actors yell and mug like the Lewis co-stars of yore, but instead of a Hollywood studio dreamworld, they’re surrounded by the suburbs and disused warehouses of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
For Lewis, nothing is sadder than a sad clown. In Hardly Working, that clown is Bo Hooper, who loses his job when a bank forecloses on his circus. It seems there’s no more room in this world for laughter, and Bo is suffering an identity crisis. For years, he was content with an itinerant existence, but that has finally changed: “I want what I never realized I wanted: to be somebody. Not just anybody, but somebody—with a direction and a purpose.” After cycling unsuccessfully through jobs, Bo finds steady work as a mailman—and, after a period of shenanigans and hijinks, finally becomes a model employee. But in the climactic scene, for reasons the film never entirely explains, Bo delivers his rounds dressed in full clown makeup, surrounded by dozens of happy children and passersby. His flummoxed boss fires him on the spot. In the postscript, we find Bo hitchhiking to clown college. After 90 minutes of its protagonist trying to conform to the adult world, the end of Hardly Working feels like a belated, poignant rebuke.
Hardly Working was a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, but Lewis directed only one more low-budget production (1983’s Cracking Up) before his film career more-or-less ended. Godard continued to work prolifically until his death in 2022, never again to a large audience, and always against a low-level critical backlash for abandoning the pleasures he conjured in his great ‘60s work. In 1980, both delivered the best kind of “return to form”—ones that acknowledge that the form, like the past, can never be recaptured. Nobody remains the man of the moment forever, but the greatest artists can survive outside of time.