The Big Mouth
| The Big Mouth | |
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| Directed by | Jerry Lewis |
| Produced by | Jerry Lewis |
| Written by | Jerry Lewis Bill Richmond |
| Starring | Jerry Lewis Harold J. Stone Susan Bay Buddy Lester Del Moore |
| Narrated by | Frank De Vol |
| Music by | Harry Betts |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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107 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2,000,000 (US/Canada) 588,356 admissions (France) |
The Big Mouth is a 1967 comedy film produced, directed, co-written, and starring Jerry Lewis released on July 12, 1967 by Columbia Pictures. It was filmed in San Diego and features Frank De Vol as an onscreen narrator.
Gerald Clamson (Lewis) is a bank examiner who loves fishing on his annual two-week holiday. Unfortunately, one day at the ocean he reels in Syd Valentine (also played by Lewis), an injured gangster in a scuba diving suit. Syd tells Gerald about diamonds he has stolen from the other gangsters and hands him a map. Gerald escapes as frogmen from a yacht machine-gun the beach. They swim ashore, locate Syd and gun him down. Their leader Thor (Harold J. Stone) ensures Syd's demise by firing a torpedo from his yacht that goes ashore, blowing a crater into the beach.
As the police ignore Gerald's story, Gerald heads to the Hilton Inn in San Diego where Syd claimed the diamonds were hidden. There he meets Suzie Cartwright (Susan Bay), an airline stewardess. While searching for the diamonds, he needs to avoid the hotel staff after inadvertently hurting the manager (Del Moore). Gerald disguises himself as a character noticeably similar to Professor Julius Kelp from The Nutty Professor, while trying to stay one step ahead of the other gangsters who are on his tail, as well as the hotel detectives led by the manager—all the while courting Suzie. As each of the gangsters see Gerald, an identical lookalike to the deceased Syd, they have nervous breakdowns; one imagining himself a dog, one turning into a Larry Fine lookalike, the other (Charlie Callas, in his usual character) becoming a hopeless stutterer. The one man Gerald meets who believes him, and identifies himself as a FBI special agent, turns out to be an escapee from an insane asylum.
The movie climaxes in a chase through Sea World San Diego, where Gerald is pursued by Thor's mob, a rival group of gangsters who had made a deal with Syd to buy his diamonds, and a group of Chinese who smuggle the diamonds disguised as plastic pearls. Gerald disguises himself as a Kabuki dancer but is pursued until Suzie rescues him by flying by with a helicopter and dropping a rope ladder that Gerald escapes on. They return to the Pacific Ocean, where Syd reappears. The gangsters chase Syd into the ocean, and Gerald and Suzie walk away, deeply in love. The diamonds are never located.
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