Jumping Jacks

Jumping Jacks follows nightclub performer Hap Smith, who has built a new comedy routine around a bumbling soldier ever since his former partner Chick Allen enlisted. Chick, now stationed at Fort Benning, is putting together a soldier show and wants his old partner back on stage with him. To get onto the base, Hap poses as a real soldier, and what begins as a short visit turns into a longer and messier deception than either man planned.

Norman Taurog directed the film, the eighth of the fourteen features he directed in chronological order, arriving between The Stooge and Pardners. Dean Martin plays Chick and Jerry Lewis plays Hap, with Mona Freeman as Betsy Carter, Don DeFore as Lieutenant Kelsey, Robert Strauss as Sergeant McClusky and Richard Erdman as Dogface Dolan. Herbert Baker, Robert Lees and Frederic I. Rinaldo wrote the screenplay, and Hal B. Wallis produced for Paramount and Wallis-Hazen Inc.

The film runs 96 minutes and was released in June 1952. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.5 out of 10 from 30 votes, a modest but positive figure that reflects a small sampling of viewers rather than broad consensus.