I think how one feels about Jerry depends partly on one’s generation. I myself was a budding teenager when I first discovered Martin & Lewis and adored their early movies. They were a comedy phenomenon in the 50s, as big or bigger than any of today’s biggest acts.
However, by the time I was adult I had grown to dislike much of his work, thought it silly. Yet, I did feel some of the films he later directed and starred in had moments of near-brilliance, two of which were “The Bellboy” and The Errand Boy.”
I especially liked him in “King of Comedy” in which he essentially played himself, and I liked—if that’s the right word for it—the painful-to-watch “Max Rose” that ran last year when he was 90. Amazingly, he made two movies after that!
As a side note, in the 70s my then-wife, a PR rep, interviewed him in Dallas and told me he did something no one else had ever done in one of her interviews: He turned on a small tape recorder and recorded every word. Today of course that’s normal, but back then not so. (She thought he was an egotistical jerk, by the way.)
In the same vein, Jerry was supposedly the first director to have a monitor on his sets so he could watch and record the action and make decisions based on playback. Totally normal now but a real innovation back then.