People, Nov. 12, 1979

Cross the wild and crazy humor of Steve Martin with the well-calculated mania of Carl Reiner and what do you get? A hyper hybrid movie called The Jerk. About a weirdo white raised by a poor black Southern family, who;hearing his first Lawrence Welk record, hits the road north to find his own kind of music. "All they played when I was a kid," explains Martin, a.k.a. the Jerk, "was blues." Martin mints a fortune by inventing nonslip eyeglasses, loses it when Reiner, in a walk-on as an irate consumer, brings a successful suit...

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