RAINDANCE 2024 | Movie Review: The Greatness Of "Shari And Lamb Chop" Speaks For Itself

Across the pond in the UK, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop are non-entities. For whatever reason, her whimsical act of ventriloquism never made it to our shores - Shari and Lamb Chop rectifies this blind spot in documentary format, introducing us finally to the magic of Shari Lewis and her magical menagerie of puppets. Through extensive archival footage and exclusive new interviews, Shari’s story is relayed in a concise 90 minutes, detailing her meteoric rise to fame in the 1960s as the country’s premier ventriloquist, her subsequent downfall, and her eventual comeback in the 1990s. 

It’s an interesting story, if a little formulaic. It’s not a documentary which is going to shift the culture, but it has no intention to do so. It’s a reflection of the culture, a re-telling of a moment in time for a new generation; it’s a mirror-held up to a classic case of rise and fall and rise again. The film is at its best when it indulges in the deliciously rich archive of Shari’s ventriloquism from the 1960s, a delicious reminder of a simpler time of children's entertainment before iPads and Roblox. She's a truly enrapturing performer, charmisma and charm simply oozing out of her in spades, and it could not be more delightful to simply witness to her work.

Once we get into Shari's declaration that Lamb Chop ‘saved’ her, the film touches on the way her personal life lay in tatters just at the moment her professional life exploded - we enter proper lump-in-your-throat territory. Shari's worldview is a crucial part of the story, and it's hard not to get swept up in her wide-eyed lust for life, her headstrong belief that the journey is as important as the destination. The film serves as a fabulous time-capsule, a capturing of that magical time in which the television was a transformative machine around which families gathered.

Whilst the documentary doesn’t necessarily push the boundaries of the form forward, it serves as a reminder of the power of documentary film-making at its simplest - it doesn’t need to be revolutionary when the subject itself is. There's very little fluff to be found in this doc. It’s a nice documentary about a nice person - nothing more, nothing less. Watch it, and you'll be grinning from ear to ear.