Living It Up

Homer Flagg works on the railroad in a remote town in New Mexico. He gets into an abandoned car on an old atomic proving ground, and his friend Steve, who is a doctor, diagnoses him with radiation poisoning: he has three weeks left. The news reaches New York and a woman reporter has him declared a hero and invites him to the city. The trouble is that the diagnosis is wrong, and the doctor works that out early. The source is Ben Hecht's Broadway musical Hazel Flagg, which itself rests on Nothing Sacred from 1937. In the original the person about to die was a woman; here it has been turned into a man. Jerry Lewis plays Homer and Dean Martin the doctor, and in those years the pair were the biggest comedy team in America. Norman Taurog directed. The joke is simple but bold for its time: it makes America's atomic tests the excuse for a comedy.