Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

A mildly entertaining film based on a Gore Vidal play. Jerry Lewis is an alien visiting Earth to observe the inhabitants. He causes some mayhem for pompous TV host Fred Clark and gets involved in a romantic triangle with Joan Blackman & Earl Holliman. There's not much more to it...Lewis performs some tricks, mostly involving levitating things. There's a talking dog (and cat!), Gale Gordon as a nosy neighbor and a very funny sequence in a beatnik night-club ("shave my beard and call me normal!") Lewis goons it up in a role that seems to have been tailor made for him, though it wasn't. Directed with a tiny bit of panache by old-timer Norman Taurog (he won the 1931 Oscar for directing SKIPPY), who spent the last fifteen years of his career helming Martin & Lewis films as well as a fair amount of Elvis films.

Back in 1955 Gore Vidal wrote a television play that later went to Broadway for 388 performances and starred Cyril Ritchard and Eddie Mayehoff. It was meant to be a satire on McCarthyism with an alien miscalculating a visit to Earth's American Civil War and arriving in Virginia a century later. So what must he have thought when his Broadway play wound up a vehicle for Jerry Lewis. Not that it's a bad Jerry Lewis, not his best to be sure, but surely not what Vidal intended.Jerry plays a most innocent alien with powers akin to what Ray Walston had in my favorite Martian. His people from way the other side of the galaxy have progressed to not only having powers beyond mortal men, but have dispensed with emotions. His people like his mentor John Williams are just below the Organians from Star Trek in that they still have corporeal bodies. Jerry wants to feel some earth like experiences so Williams gives him a chance.He experiences emotions all right, but a little too much for one Visit To A Small Planet. How he copes with Earth and its Earthlings is for you watch the film for.I can see that the characters that are played by the cynical Fred Clark and the excitable and paranoid Gale Gordon might have made great counterpoints for satire. But Jerry Lewis never has done satire and I doubt at his age he'll try it. Lee Patrick plays a role modeled on what she did as Leo G. Carroll's wife in the television version of Topper.It's jealousy that does Jerry in, mainly the jealousy that Earl Holliman feels as his girl and Clark and Patrick's daughter Joan Blackman starts taking an interest in their outer space visitor. Truth be told I can't see what Blackman sees in Holliman's lunkhead character. Holliman must have felt ridiculous doing the part.Best sequence in the film is Lewis and Blackman's visit to a beatnik joint and the impression he makes on all those cool cats. You'll get a chance to see ace drummer Buddy Rich in that scene and that should never be passed up.Visit To A Small Planet is a decent enough Jerry Lewis film, but far from whatever Gore Vidal had in mind.

"Visit to a Small Planet" is an early Jerry Lewis solo film. Apparently, it was originally a teleplay and then a very successful Broadway play and I have no idea how close all this is to the film. However, considering that the author was NOT at all pleased with the casting of Lewis, I assume the projects are very, very different.The planet begins in some sort of far off world across the universe. A crazy guy (Lewis) makes a nuisance of himself and constantly talks about how fascinated he is by humans that the big boss-man (John Williams) decides to allow him to visit this insignificant place--to get it out of his system. There, he meets a nice family and hangs out with them--getting into all sorts of adventures.Some of the film is quite funny (such as when Jerry drinks for the first time). However, most of it is just pleasant light-hearted fun. However, the longer the film goes, the less fun it becomes. It's unusual to see a film fade like this one did, but the final portion lost momentum and had some flat moments that were clearly overdone. Worst were the beatnik scene (at first, it wasn't bad) and the final scene with the spaceship was just awful. Also, occasionally Lewis mugged a bit too much--something that he had a tendency to do a bit too often in his films. Overall, a flawed but pleasant diversion.cute drunk scene and ceiling excessive mugging (such as the bongo scene)

This has to be where Robin Williams drew his inspiration from for Mork of Ork. While this movie is by no means the funniest fish out of water film you could see, I think it still rates a look IF you could just find it somewhere...