Lenny Bruce Without Tears

Lenny Bruce would have hated this film. He would have called it sloppy, both in execution and in feeling. Although it contains some brilliant and excruciatingly funny routines from various stages in Bruce's career (and some interesting interviews), it is linked together by a moralistic continuity, hammered home by Fred Baker's heavy-voiced, humourless narration, concerned to point out how Bruce was driven to his death by a society fighting back against the vision of itself that he revealed. The moral may be true, in part; but it is too simple. Still, careless and sentimentalised as it is, the film is well worth seeing for every frame of Bruce (except the truly obscene final shots).