Jerry Lewis’s romantic comedy Three on a Couch (1966) works off a rather outrageous premise. Chris (Lewis) is an artist who has won a year-long residency in France. He wants to marry his girlfriend Liz (Janet Leigh) and move with her to Paris. But Liz, a psychoanalyst, can’t leave her practice because she’s not making progress with three of her patients who depend on her. Each of these three girls—of a uniformly doll-like beauty, differentiated by accents and hairstyles—has turned into a man-hater following a heartbreak. Liz is helpless and Chris is becoming increasingly morose. Chris’ best friend, the obstetrician Ben (James Best), gives him an idea: seduce the three girls so they can be cured of their misandry and Liz can leave for Paris. Playing three different men with characteristics tailored to each girl, Chris goes about making them fall for him.

As the title indicates, psychoanalysis here is euphemism for sexual intercourse. When Liz penetrates the minds of her patients, her office is lit in saturated, psychedelic colours, like some seedy den of sin conceived by Frank Tashlin. One of the girls, a sportive type, keeps moving her legs, through which the camera moves at one point. Psychoanalysis being a substitute for sex, the three girls are in an unstated romantic relation with Liz. The comedy therefore derives from one man’s attempt to win back his girlfriend from the seductions of other women by seducing away these women. Underpinning the humour is the rather retrograde notion that lesbians simply need a good dick to be cured.

Well, that’s the text. But there’s something else going on underneath, against the flow, reversing the text even. We are told that Chris was once Liz’s patient. During the credits, we see him enter her office with the appearance of a hermit, but we don’t exactly know what his problem was. Given how Liz exclusively works with issues of sexuality, we might suppose Chris too is tormented on that front. In the first scene, Chris goes to the French consulate to claim his residency and reward. He is an artist—one of Hollywood’s euphemisms for a gay man. Posing for the photo-op, he kisses the French diplomat, who tells him that it wasn’t necessary. “For $10000, you’re lucky it wasn’t on the lips”, says Chris.

When we first see Ben, he’s trying to convince Liz to go with Chris to Paris. “Any girl that won’t have babies is anti-business” is the reason this obstetrician gives. Shortly after, he arrives at a bar to talk to Chris. The whole scene plays out like the first meeting of two lovers who have long separated. This conversation, as all of Ben’s scenes in the film, is loaded with innuendo that suggest that his relation to Chris, “his best friend”, is more than platonic. He lays out the plan to Chris: “If I were a girl who hated men and wanted someone to talk me out of it, I wouldn’t go to another girl, I’d go to Cary Grant”. “Man is the cause, man is the cure”, he says, prompting Chris to play the “bohemian” lover to the three girls. Chris likes the idea, but demurs. Ben reminds him of their college days. “You seem awfully happy about this”, notes Chris, to which Ben replies, “Well, it’s good for my business”.

As the plan is afoot, Ben visits Chris in his apartment. The exchange between them strips away all context, accommodating any supposition:

Ben: “What are you so sad about?”

Chris: “What am I looking so sad about? Suppose Elizabeth finds out.”

Ben: “How is she gonna find out?”

Chris: “That’s what I’m worried about.”

Ben: “In a city as big as L.A.? It’ll never happen.”

Chris: “In a city as big as L.A. That’s when it does happen.”

Just then, Liz rings the bell. Chris opens fumblingly, and Ben prepares to leave the apartment right away for no reason. The couple sits on the couch as Liz starts recounting how her patients are showing signs of cure, not knowing that Chris is behind all this. Now, Jerry Lewis’ sequencing tends to be rather austere, not particularly marked by camera movements. During conversation scenes, he avoids shot/reverse shot constructions, instead drawing the viewer into the space through axial cuts from medium two-shots to tighter solo shots. But here, he allows himself a flourish. The camera arcs from behind the sofa where the couple are sitting and goes at the diametrically opposite point, reversing the actors’ on-screen positions. The reversal is equally thematic, for Chris is as much a pawn in Ben’s plan as Liz is in his.

Notwithstanding the tacked-on happy ending, one against-the-grain reading of the plot illustrates its symmetry: Chris thinks he’s winning back Liz by seducing the girls, but it might well be Ben who’s trying to win back Chris by urging him to carry out this hopeless plan. So we can’t always say who’s controlling whom; at several points, the three characters move in a way that swaps their positions in the frame.

Ben’s romance is barely veiled. In a ballroom scene, as Chris necks Liz during a slow dance, Lewis cuts to Ben’s reaction, a wholly uncomfortable insert held for too long. Ben forces an awkward, pained smile. As the couple dances, Ben gets up from the seat to encourage Chris to continue dancing, as though he needed that encouragement. In a later scene, Ben and Chris leave a party hall into a private room. Lewis makes an ambiguous cut to Liz discussing with her secretary about how pretty something looks; “a natural romance”, adds the secretary. (The entire party scene—constructed around a Kafkaesque elevator that’s always there but never accessible—is small masterpiece of screen comedy, dialled-up with uncharacteristically tight, claustrophobic compositions that cry for a release.)

In his extraordinary Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), which played this week at the Filmmuseum München retrospective online, Mark Rappaport picks out moments from Hudson’s films that surreptitiously relay information about the actor’s homosexuality, revelations often mitigated by a safely heterosexual plot context. The filmmaker extracts these lines and gestures out of their context to build his case that Hudson’s homosexuality was there to see for anyone who cared to pay close attention. This hacking of the texts, this decontextualization, frustrating from an academic point of view, is very much the point of the film, which forges a young admirer’s private fantasy in the vein of Hollywood Babylon from public documents. Rappaport’s explosive work throws light on the complex workings of the Hollywood movie, where several extra-textual narratives intermingle to pin down an ever-slippery network of meanings.

Someone watching Three on a Couch with no knowledge of the actors’ private lives may similarly suppose that Jerry Lewis and James Best were queer, and that this detail was being sublimated in a story about heterosexual supremacy. The scenes between them have a touch of camp, but Lewis’ performance and characterization are especially striking.

A Lewis operation is generally room-wrecking, his physicality dominating every other element of the aesthetic. Here, on the other hand, he is largely withdrawn. He doesn’t begin with the Lewis persona right away. He starts off, in fact, as a rather obnoxious figure, throwing tantrums and blackmailing Liz when she refuses to go with him to Paris. In his scenes with Liz, he is often photographed from the back, not unlike how Cary Grant is filmed in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), the lack of our access to his facial reactions making him seem even more sinister. There are no reverse shots, and his inward-looking body language clearly spells a repressed character.

What’s Ben’s seduction plan for Chris if not an opportunity for him to perform heterosexual romances with women without ever personally investing in it, just like what Rock Hudson and other queer stars of Hollywood always did in their movies? It even offers Chris a chance to cross-dress as a character named Heather. Sexually speaking, the Jerry Lewis persona oscillates between a childish pre- or asexuality and blustering ultra-masculinity. Here, Ben’s plan decomposes Chris’ relatively complex personality into three simple archetypes: Ringo the alpha man of the west, Warren the sportive urban male and Rutherford the gay mamma’s boy. Once this decomposition is in place, all three archetypes are subjected to the Jerry treatment; in a montage of funny courting scenes (chopped up into single gags so as to put Jerry back into his comfort zone), we see how each of these men fails in the sole characteristic he is supposed to uphold.

So I suspect Three on a Couch is to Lewis what Punch-Drunk Love (2002) is to Adam Sandler: a deconstruction, a look at what likes on the other side of his screen persona, defined equally by arrested development. But the more fundamental question of whether it’s legitimate for heterosexual actors like Lewis and Best to play gay characters playing heterosexual characters is a Gordian knot I can’t yet undo.

This kind of in-joking—whether imposed or willed—is not uncommon in the work of queer actors like Grant, Hudson and Montgomery Clift. And unlike, say, Indian male movie stars, who operate in a firmly heterosexual framework that can only allow their drag roles and performed queerness to be read as jokes, Lewis and Best are working in Hollywood of 1966, whose historical and cultural context won’t let viewers brush aside the significations of these ‘crossovers’. Which is to say, Three on a Couch may have been a cultural relic even in its time, like all Jerry Lewis films.