The Los Angeles Times du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • 331

JERRY LEWIS: LAUGHING ON THE OUTSIDE "The word comeback doesn't annoy or displease me, it hurts me," says Jerry Les. His first film release in 10 years, "Hardly Working," opens here April 3. Delicate Delinquent." And for the first time, we'll see the "heavy Jerry," playing the title role in "The King of Comedy," which has one of the strangest casting combinations of this era or any other. Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis starring in a Martin Scorsese film. That's right, "Raging Bull" meets "Cin-derfella." The heavy Jerry and the nutty Jerry will even meet in a third film, a cinematic adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's surrealistic Please Turn to Page 22 BY DALE POLLOCK Jerry Lewis is nobody's fool.

Except his own. First there was the brash young screamer with the plastic face, the gangly neck, the outstretched arms, paired with a crooner who liked to play drunk. But that life ended, and Jerry became more of a dual personality: still doing the shtick in Las Vegas, but also the serious film maker. To the French critics he was the ultimate auteur writer, director, performer. It's all there: 42 films, nearly half a billion dollars in worldwide box office.

Then he became something else: the tearful sponsor of "My Kids," the always-advancing enemy of a disease few had heard of until he put it on millions of spare change cans and eventually made it the beneficiary of a multimillion dollar fund-raising campaign. And that's where he's been for the last 10 years or so: doing his 13 weeks at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, playing to adoring crowds in Europe, hitting the hustings for his Muscular Dystrophy But Jerry the triple-threat film maker? The Clown Prince? The Roi du Comedie? He hasn't been heard from much lately. Until now. "Hardly Working," Lewis' first film to be released in more than a decade, opens in 800 movie theaters April 3, backed by a $5-million advertising campaign (heavy on TV adsj that's where Jerry's known) from 20th Century-Fox. Then Lewis begins "Smorgasbord," an almost-silent comedy in which he'll play 67 different characters in a return to the "nutty Jerry" of "The Bellboy" and "The PORTRAIT OF A 'THIEF' BY A YOUNG MANN SPOTLIGHT After a dalliance with a sexy adult novel, author Roald Dahl is back writing the kiddie books.

Page 4. Joe Strummer of Clash: Politics and the band. Page 58. Jazz criticism, talent and race. By Leonard Feather.

Page 76. Bully for a silver show at LACMA. By Suzanne Muchnic. Page 79. BY SHEILA BENSON Look up film noir and you find it applied to films of "a dark somber tone and cynical, pessimistic, mood." "Thief belongs among those, but it bursts beyond that confining category like a land speed-record car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and about as noisily.

Like good film noir, "Thief is essences, an economically etched portrait of criminals and of life not only in the fast lane, but in the slipstream of professional crime. But it is more. With his opening shot, Michael for a $40 theft, he has graduated from the prison system at 31 with the makings of a master thief. What Caan learned from Okla, his father-figure on the inside (Willie Nelson), may simply have been philosophy and contacts, but four years on the outside have honed these gifts. Caan is now among the "highline," the 200-or-so elite of America's jewel thieves who steal unset, untraceable diamonds.

Prison also has forged Caan's philoso-Please Turn to Page 24 Mann, its young director-writer-executive producer, seems to have declared war on the passive audience. He pounds his film into you in a combination of big, clean images; taut, edgy performances and a score which intertwines both sound and music. There is no respite from it is bravura movie making. James Caan plays its hero Frank, Chicago born and Joliet bred. Over 11 years' time, the state of Illinois has given him an apprenticeship it may regret.

Jailed at 20.