It’s, like, a total catharsis, baby

Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jerry Lewis on the set of One More Time, the very strange sequel to Salt & Pepper via Drew Friedman; click to enlarge. As I wrote in a previous post:

“The only film directed by Jerry Lewis in which he does not appear, One More Time (1970) sits, just waiting for a cult to germinate. The 1960s were chockablock with cinematic weirdness, but few pushed the envelope as far or in as many unexpected directions. It was a sequel to a static faux Rat Pack movie, Salt & Pepper (1968), where a young Richard Donner laid the groundwork for his oeuvre of mediocrity. It starred Peter Lawford as ‘Pepper’ and Sammy Davis, Jr. as ‘Salt’ (yuk! yuk!…get it?), two swingin’ cats operating a swingin’ nightclub in a swingin’ London decidedly void of mods and rockers. The hipster-geezer fever dream continued in One More Time, with Jerry shaping their relationship into a clone of his long-since-deceased partnership with Dean Martin — Peter as Deano, Sammy as Jer. The screenplay by Michael Pertwee (The Mouse on the Moon, Strange Bedfellows) was wrung dry for both maudlin pathos and bizarre slapstick, putting Sammy in the unenviable position of transferring the bipolar situations in a performance that glides uneasily from weepy insincerity to something hideously abstract (re: “Here come da judge, here come da judge, here come da judge…”). Upon seeing this the first time, I believed a lengthy (albeit insane) thesis could be composed on its daring and… brilliance? But who in their right mind would believe me?”