Martin Scorsese (1982)
The King of Comedy was eagerly awaited. It was Martin Scorsese’s first film after Raging Bull and his fifth collaboration with Robert De Niro. Its premise – the lengths to which a nobody will go to become a somebody – looked to embody a disturbing insight into American celebrity culture, after nearly two decades of nationally traumatising assassinations and attempted assassinations. That the nobody’s desire was for show business success sealed the quintessential nature of the story and resonated with an assassination attempt of particular importance to Scorsese and De Niro: John Hinckley Jr’s attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, the first Hollywood star to become President of the United States. Hinckley claimed to be motivated by his obsession with Jodie Foster and, specifically, the character Foster played in Taxi Driver; he thus implied a kinship of sorts with De Niro’s Travis Bickle. The King of Comedy, written by Paul D Zimmerman, was a critical and commercial failure, in America anyway, but it’s not unusual for the notorious failures of very talented people who’ve enjoyed frequent success to be re-evaluated – and overrated – in due course and that seems to have happened in this case. According to Wikipedia, the movie is included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1000 Essential Films and The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made. If making the top thousand doesn’t sound seriously exclusive, The King of Comedy now also features in the top hundred lists of Empire and Total Film. I recall being disappointed when I saw the film on its original release. I may have watched it once more in the thirty years since but, if I did, my opinion didn’t change much as a result of that second viewing. Seeing it this week at BFI hasn’t transformed the way I feel about The King of Comedy but it was different in several ways from what I remembered. I still don’t think it’s a good movie but I found it absorbing this time around.
As Jerry Langford, the famous comedian and talk show host whom the would-be ‘king of comedy’ Rupert Pupkin wants to emulate, Jerry Lewis is by far the best thing in the film. For those who (like me) know him only as the hyperkinetic goofball of 1950s screen comedies, Lewis’s glum, stiff presence in The King of Comedy is startling. Jerry Langford, jaded by and isolated in his showbiz success, is not a man at ease with himself and Lewis’s physical interpretation of this unease is masterly. Fronting his nightly chat show, Jerry comes across to his audience as a dry wit: you soon realise that his rigid smile to the television camera is less a comic device than a weary professional duty – the pained quality of the smile tells you more about what’s behind it. Walking in a New York street – although he dreads the attention of excited fans, he seems virtually addicted to exposing himself to their attention – Jerry cuts a strange figure. There’s something of a Jack Benny mince to his gait but he wears his suits like armour. Once Rupert starts pestering Jerry, Lewis’s face and voice convey a fathomless contempt for the younger man – a contempt leavened by dismayed realisation that nothing Jerry says is going to budge Rupert from his arrogant determination to be a big-time comic. Rupert isn’t the only ambitious fan hounding Jerry Langford: the wealthy Manhattanite Masha, who’s obsessed with Jerry in a more sexual way, is also determined to get close to him. The combination of Masha’s hysterical behaviour and Sandra Bernhard’s extraordinary, harpy-like features is excessive. No doubt Scorsese means Bernhard’s Masha to be an expressionist study of the young woman’s ravenous soul but the grotesque effect is offensive not only in the director’s lack of sympathy for the character but also in his exploitation of the actress’s unusual looks. Yet Sandra Bernhard is likeable in spite of that; and although she throws herself into the role with abandon, her performance is more controlled – has more shadings – than I’d remembered.
The other surprise for me was that the kidnap of Jerry Langford occurs more than halfway through the film – much more screen time than I’d remembered is devoted to Rupert Pupkin’s preceding, fruitless efforts to convince Jerry of his worth. Unfortunately, this means more of Robert De Niro’s unsatisfying playing of Rupert. Pauline Kael was enraged with disappointment by the turn that De Niro’s acting had taken in recent films – so enraged that some of her scathing review of his work in The King of Comedy is barely articulate. She was essentially right, though, about the shift in De Niro’s approach. In her admiring description of his performance in Taxi Driver, Kael wrote:
‘Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness – he’s reached down into his own anomie.’
In doing so, De Niro created one of the screen’s most memorable characters: Travis Bickle was convincing both in his isolation and in the intensity of the frustration caused by that isolation. ‘This man is burning in misery’, Kael noted, ‘and his inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions’. In The King of Comedy (and the De Niro films that came immediately before it), however:
‘De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul. It’s not merely that he hollows himself out and becomes Jake La Motta, or Des the priest in True Confessions, or Rupert Pupkin – he makes them hollow, too, and merges with the character’s emptiness.’
I’m not sure this is entirely right as far as De Niro’s portrait of Pupkin is concerned – although a hollowing out may well have been the actor’s aim. Rupert is convinced of his own merits as a comedian and that he deserves to be a celebrity. He doesn’t listen – he has no interest in anyone else’s opinion of him – and doesn’t realise how objectionable he is. Kael is right that Rupert ‘is as boring to us as he is to Langford’. But De Niro, in spite of an unflattering hairstyle and moustache, struggles to be as unprepossessing as Rupert is surely meant to be. When Rupert tries to ingratiate himself with Jerry Langford and his office minions, De Niro hasn’t completely shed his natural charisma: he’s annoying but he isn’t a nonentity – there isn’t a sufficient discrepancy between Rupert’s stupid but eyecatching clothes and the insignificance of the man inhabiting them. (It isn’t necessary, of course, that Rupert, because he lacks comic talent, should also lack humour and charm, but Scorsese takes a misanthropic view of the wannabes in the story. Just as it seems the audience is meant to experience Masha’s desperate desire for Jerry Langford as something physically repellent, so Rupert’s misconceived idea of himself as a comedy headliner must be underlined by his failing in any kind of human interaction.
There are sequences that make little sense – the fact that the film can be termed a comedy rather than a realistic drama is no defence since The King of Comedy, whatever it is, depends on a real world being in place to obstruct the realisation of Rupert’s fantasy. He persuades Rita (Diahnne Abbott), a girl he liked in high school who’s now working in a bar, that he’s been invited to a weekend gathering at Jerry Langford’s country mansion. It’s a stretch to believe that the sane Rita would buy this but perhaps she’s disappointed enough with her own life to do so. It’s ridiculous, once they fetch up at the mansion and before Jerry has been called back from the golf course by his butler, that Rita is the one making herself at home, dancing to records and venturing upstairs to explore. (It is more credible that, when he chucks them out, Rita surreptitiously puts a little objet d’art of Jerry’s in her bag before leaving.) The rapid cut from this exit to Rupert and Masha together in a car preparing to abduct Jerry elides the challenge of describing the planning of the enterprise – and of Rupert and Masha’s agreeing to join forces (until they do so, each seems determined to show the other that their own obsession with Jerry is the only one that counts). It’s bad enough that, in order to make clear that Rupert Pupkin is a fool, he’s given a foolish surname, but worse that, as he tells the receptionist in Jerry Langford’s office, it’s often mispronounced. Sure enough, the receptionist (Margo Winkler), Jerry’s assistant (Shelley Hack) and others call him ‘Pumpkin’ and ‘Pipkin’ and so on for the next few minutes. (Quite a few people at BFI for the ‘Philosophical Screens’ showing of the film, presided over by academics from Kingston University, seemed to think these jokes were genuinely funny.)
The ransom to be paid for Jerry Langford’s release is a ten-minute spot for Rupert on Jerry’s show that evening. The TV show sequences are well done throughout the film: it’s effective that you’re left unsure about whether some of these are Rupert’s fantasies and the involvement of real comedians and/or comic actors as themselves – Tony Randall is guest host for the show when Jerry is ‘tied up’ and there are appearances from the likes of Victor Borge and the show announcer Ed Herlihy – gives the material an edge. Rupert’s negotiations with the TV producers and the police, followed by his performance on the show, are the strongest part of The King of Comedy. This is partly because, in order for Rupert to get what he wants, Scorsese and Paul Zimmerman have no option but to make him less inept than he has been up to this point. De Niro is better here, giving Rupert an interesting mixture of intransigence and almost serene relief as he strikes his hard bargain; and he’s much better when Rupert actually gets his moment in the spotlight. Some of Rupert’s jokes about his benighted New Jersey adolescence aren’t bad and his delivery isn’t as terrible as you expect. The effect of this, however, is to increase your frustration with how De Niro played him earlier in the film. Pauline Kael was especially infuriated that ‘Rupert waves his arms when he talks; they work in pairs, as if he didn’t have the brains to move them independently of each other’. De Niro uses this mannerism when Rupert is doing his TV spot: it would be more convincing there – as an illustration of Rupert’s limitations (or inexperience) as a performer – if you hadn’t been watching it throughout. The least effective part of Rupert’s spiel comes at its very end, when he moves from joking to the audience that he’s had to kidnap Jerry Langford in order to get this appearance to anticipating the-moral-of-the-story: he tells the audience that, after tonight, everyone will know who Rupert Pupkin is. (Rupert is much too self-centred to care about being a paradigm of the perversion of the American Dream.) Scorsese wraps things up with a too obviously satirical summary of the fame and fortune Rupert finds before and after he’s completed his time in jail.
7 May 2014
