His solo films in the late 1950s and early 1960s established the character type he would return to repeatedly: the hapless innocent, the well-meaning bumbler, the childlike figure navigating a world that was not built for him. “The Delicate Delinquent” (1957) was his first solo feature, in which he played a misfit youth. It made money. His subsequent films continued to do so.
What changed in this period was his ambition behind the camera. Lewis had been studying film technique throughout the Martin years, and he began directing his own pictures. “The Bellboy” (1960), his directorial debut, was filmed quickly and cheaply at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach and surprised the industry by performing well at the box office. “The Ladies Man” (1961), “The Errand Boy” (1961), and “The Patsy” (1964) followed, each demonstrating a more sophisticated visual sense than his early solo work.
“The Nutty Professor” (1963) became the most critically analyzed of his solo films, in part because it seemed to be about something beyond its premise. Lewis played Julius Kelp, a clumsy chemistry professor who develops a potion that transforms him into the suave, aggressive Buddy Love—a character widely interpreted as a satirical portrait of Dean Martin, or at least of what Lewis understood Martin to represent. The film was a commercial success and has remained a subject of serious discussion among film scholars ever since.
In France, that discussion had been happening since the mid-1950s. French critics associated with the Cahiers du Cinéma had identified Lewis as an auteur—a filmmaker with a distinctive personal vision—before American critics were prepared to grant him that status. Lewis received the Légion d’Honneur from the French government in 1984, a distinction that American commentators sometimes used to mock both Lewis and the French, and that Lewis accepted as the recognition he felt he had been denied at home.