PicoBlog

The Ladies Man has the distinction of being the first and only film based on a Saturday Night Live sketch with an African-American protagonist and an African-American director. 

That protagonist is of course Leon Phelps (Tim Meadows), a throwback to the grooviest days of the 1970s with a towering Afro, a wardrobe that seemingly hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration, a lisping purr of a voice and an obsession with doing it in the butt. 

As a hyper-sexual womanizer with an enormous penis whose life revolves around sleeping with as many women as he possible, Leon is unmistakably a stereotype. 

On paper the premise of The Ladies Man looks as provocative and incendiary as anything Ralph Baskhi or Spike Lee ever created. It’s the story of a horny black man who enrages the overwhelmingly white husbands of the women he seduces to the point that they form an angry mob to try to bring him down. 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to call the angry, sexually humiliated white victims of Leon Phelps’ raging tornado of a libido a lynch mob. 

The Ladies Man makes a wildly offensive premise toothless and inoffensive by inhabiting an alternate universe where race and racism do not exist. 

It begins with an orphaned Leon being left on the doorstep of a wealthy white bachelor who taught his adopted son everything that he knew about banging random skanks before his adopted son betrayed him by sleeping with one of his lovers. 

Leon grew up to be uniquely sex-obsessed, a self-styled ladies man whose life is one long pursuit of conquests. If The Ladies Man were ever to acknowledge the thorny, painful realities of race and racism it would venture into tricky, difficult territory it understandably wants to avoid at all costs. 

I did not enjoy The Ladies Man at the time of its release but at least four things have happened since then that made me optimistic that I’d have a better experience this time around. They are:

Sure enough I did enjoy The Ladies Man more this time around. I found myself laughing quite a bit during its first half.

Some of this laughter was what I call double laughter, where you laugh at something incredibly stupid or silly and then you laugh at yourself for being amused by something so egregiously, transcendently idiotic. 

For example at one point in the film Leon tries to secure work at a number of different radio stations, including a Christian station. His in-studio guest is a nun who unwittingly makes a series of crude double entendres all about how much she loves the missionary position, and can’t get enough of the missionary position, and wants to hold the missionary position as long as possible. 

Leon sweats profusely. It’s taking every bit of strength he possesses not to immediately go XXX. Eventually he can’t hold back anymore and reverts to his baseline of raging horniness. 

It is an incredibly stupid scene and I laughed like an idiot even though I knew exactly where everything was going. I laughed a lot in the early going before the filmmakers had to ruin everything with a plot. 

In The Ladies Man Leon, the self-described “Mother Theresa of boning”, gets into trouble with the FCC due to the ragingly inappropriate nature of his call-in show and the nature of his advice, much of which revolves around doing it in the butt. 

For Leon, life is a perpetual quiet storm with a glass of Courvoisier in his hand, incense in the air and a random woman in his bed. 

He’s on-air talent at a radio station run by an apoplectic Eugene Levy in what is his only appearance in a Saturday Night Live film. 

Leon’s faithful producer Julie Simmons (Karyn Parsons) believes in him even though seemingly everything he says violates the rules of the FCC. Ah, but Julie is here to do more than just serve as Leon’s unwavering sidekick and support. 

Leon’s unfortunate emotional arc here calls for him to begin the film an unrepentant horn-dog who chases every woman he sees before learning through experience that banging random skanks is all well and good but it’s nothing compared to the satisfaction of settling down with the right woman. 

In order to fit the conventions of movies like these the Ladies Man must stop being a ladies man. The right woman is of course Julie. She’s beautiful but not too beautiful as well as loyal, dependable, smart and hard-working. 

In other words, she’s way too good for someone like Leon. That means that her emotional arc involves going from seeing a silly caricature of Ford-era lasciviousness as first a ridiculous buffoon and then the man of her dreams. That’s a thankless role literally and figuratively. 

Parsons gives it her all and is, if anything, too appealing, but the only moment in her performance that stands out for me is a scene where she clearly laughs at something Tim Meadows says for a solid twenty seconds. 

It’s incredibly unprofessional. She’s blatantly corpsing but it’s strangely winning. I don’t know why director Reginald Hudlin, of House Party and Boomerang fame, kept it in except that it’s a moment of true spontaneity, something real in a sea of hackneyed shtick.

The Ladies Man is at its best when Leon is looking for a new job and Julie plays excerpts from the show to mortified would-be employers that run the gamut from wildly inappropriate to screamingly offensive. 

At an Easy Listening station a prospective employer asks Leon if he’s familiar with a “little singer” named Celine Dion and he deadpans, “No. Who is that?” 

Then, unfortunately, the plot kicks in. Leon gets a letter from a former lover promising to use her money to help him out of a jam. 

The letter writer did not leave her name so Leon then sets about desperately looking for the lost love he hopes will make his future rosy.

Leon sleeps with Julie in what he refers to as his “personal skankuary” so she is less than enthused about a man she is inexplicably in love with searching for a former lover. 

Will Ferrell gets an “And” credit for playing Leon’s antagonist, an enraged husband who was too busy wrestling his “best friend” to notice that his wife was cheating on him with Leon. 

Ferrell’s sexually confused cuckold is, as you can probably guess, a gay panic joke in human form. Ferrell is a real pro (and also the star of Semi Pro) so he handles all of the gay panic humor as deftly as possible but gay panic is never funny but it is inherently homophobic since it derives unseemly delight in heterosexual men forced to do gay stuff or gay men not knowing that they’re gay when seemingly everyone else in the world does. 

The highlight of the angry husband subplot comes in the form of a musical set-piece where these schlubby suburban husbands and sub-par lovers suddenly begin moving and grooving like Bob Fosse. 

In the end The Ladies Man is an unsatisfying cinematic experience for pretty much the exact same reason that the vast majority of movies based on Saturday Night Live characters don’t work: characters created to spout catchphrases in six minute sketches aren’t deep or complex enough to support being the protagonist of a three act major motion picture. 

The Ladies Man was not a hit. It did so poorly that there wasn’t another Saturday Night Live movie for another ten years. 

MacGruber was the next and, to date, final Saturday Night Live movie. I love, love, love that ridiculous movie but I am going to delay my gratification and cover it towards the end of this strange journey. 

Meadows eventually became a popular and beloved cinematic character actor but it was as a supporting player, not a star. 

The Ladies Man is good for some laughs but not even the awesome power of nostalgia can transform it into a genuine success instead of a movie that fundamentally does not work but has more than its share of guffaws.

Up next: Mr. Saturday Night maybe? 

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