General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Ladies Man (1961 film)

The Ladies Man is a 1961 American comedy film directed by, co-written by, produced by, and starring Jerry Lewis as Herbert H. Heebert, a heartbroken young man who takes a job as houseboy in a Hollywood boarding house inhabited only by women. It was Lewis's second feature as a director and his first in color, released by Paramount Pictures.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / star	Jerry Lewis, as Herbert H. Heebert; his second feature as director and first in color¹^•²
Studio / release	Paramount Pictures; Brooklyn premiere 28 Jun 1961, New York opening 12 Jul 1961, Los Angeles 19 Jul 1961¹
Production	$3.1 million budget; 42-day shoot began 30 Nov 1960; Technicolor¹
Main set	A four-story cutaway "dollhouse" boarding-house set built on Paramount soundstages; Lewis put its cost at $1 million³
Screenplay	Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond, with an early draft by Mel Brooks, who was reported at work on the screenplay in August 1960¹
Principal cast	Helen Traubel (Helen Welenmelon), Pat Stanley (Fay), Kathleen Freeman (Katie), with George Raft and Harry James as themselves⁴
Running time	106 minutes per the AFI Catalog; other listings give 95 or 96 minutes¹^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Herbert H. Heebert, a recent junior-college graduate, is rejected by his student girlfriend and becomes an avowed woman-hater, leaving town for California. There he takes a job as houseboy at a large boarding hotel owned by Helen Welenmelon, a retired opera star, only to learn that the house is populated by thirty-one career women. He tries to quit, but Miss Welenmelon persuades him to stay. Most of the women think him cute but stupid, while Fay, an aspiring actress played by Pat Stanley, takes a genuine interest in him and helps him overcome his girl-shyness.¹

Comic set pieces follow: Herbert wrecks a television interview arranged for Miss Welenmelon, runs afoul of the boarders' dates, including the actor George Raft playing himself, and leads a surprise birthday party at which he impersonates Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, and Groucho Marx. Led to believe the women are kind to him only because houseboys are hard to find, he prepares to leave, but the boarders convince him of their genuine affection, and he stays.¹

Production

The film was announced in April 1960 as Jerry Lewis's next independent production for Paramount, slated to shoot in fall 1960. On 8 August 1960 the trade press reported that Mel Brooks, then a young writer, was at work on the screenplay. Production was rescheduled to begin 15 November 1960, and the forty-two-day shoot actually commenced on 30 November 1960. The film cost $3.1 million.¹

The dollhouse set. The production's centerpiece was a steel-framed, forty-room building three and a half stories high, constructed on Stage 14 at Paramount with the outside wall cut away to give the camera an X-ray view of the rooms and hallways inside. The New York Times described it in December 1960 as a free-form reproduction of Hollywood's Studio Club, the boarding house long operated by the Young Women's Christian Association for aspiring young actresses.⁵ Lewis put the set's cost at $1 million, and the film still finished over schedule and over budget.³ The opening of the house is staged with a camera crane so large it occupied another soundstage, pulling back to reveal the full four-story set.³

Video assist. Although videotape existed in 1961, Lewis placed closed-circuit monitors around the set so he could watch the camera's image while performing, a pioneering use of what became the video assist.¹¹ The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader and author of books on American and international cinema, notes that Lewis apparently first used the technique on his previous feature, The Bellboy (1960), with a small video camera attached to the large VistaVision film camera.³^•²

Music and style

Walter Scharf, a longtime Lewis collaborator, composed the score, with Bobby Van scoring, conducting, and staging the dances. The songs "Don't Go to Paris," "He Doesn't Know," and "Ladies' Man" pair lyrics by Jack Brooks with music by Harry Warren, and bandleader Harry James appears on screen with his orchestra.¹ Ensemble scenes play out largely wordlessly against the brassy swing soundtrack, and one fantasy sequence opens a forbidden door onto an all-white room where a dancer descends from the ceiling and the Harry James Orchestra performs on a balcony that exists nowhere but in Lewis's imagination.³

Critics have read the film as an examination of its hero's fear of women rather than a straightforward sex comedy. The online journal Senses of Cinema describes Herbert's situation, a man avoiding women who ends up working in a house of women, as resolving neither into romance nor womanizing but into a symbiosis between his longing to be needed and the women's willingness to let him run errands.⁶ Richard Brody of The New Yorker calls the boarding house a metaphor for the inescapable world of women and a projection of the character's repressed desires.⁷

Reception

American critics were, for the most part, impressed, and the French reception was enthusiastic; the TCM retrospective notes that the cliché about the French proclaiming Lewis a genius has roots in this period of his work.³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from 11 critics and a 67% audience score.⁸ The film has since been valued for its technique as much as its comedy: Rosenbaum calls it Lewis's opulent second feature and in some ways his most ambitious, and the large-scale cutaway set is regularly cited among the production achievements of Lewis's cinema.²^•⁹

The film remains available on digital platforms, streaming in the United States on services including MGM Plus and available to rent or buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026