THE JERK
Directed by Carl Reiner Screenplay by Steve Martin, Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias
A man who invents a completely new perversion at this stage in humanity's march to glory must be held in deepest respect. Comedian Steve Martin managed the trick in his second record album, A Wild and Crazy Guy. He had heard about these absolutely disgusting exhibitions that were being held in Mexico, he said. Cat juggling. "They take the little kitties ..." It is funny, because it calls to mind a bizarre vision of serious cats slashing at a demented Mexican juggler, while an audience of gringo tourists giggles obscenely. The cruelty that would be involved in actually juggling cats is not offensive, partly because Martin mutes it by hysterically expressing his own disgust.
There's a cat-juggling scene in The Jerk, the first movie in which Martin has starred, and although it is a direct cinematic translation of the record album sketch, it does not work very well. The kittens used by the juggler (a gent listed in the credits as Pig Eye Jackson) seem pretty confused, and they don't do much except twist a little in the air. Martin expresses his ambivalent disgust, but since he helped write the screenplay, and since real kittens, no doubt much confused, must have been used to film the sequence, the moviegoer feels somewhat ambivalent himself. If the scene is not actually sick, it is at least somewhat indisposed.
The Jerk will not drive away any Steve Martin fans, but neither is it likely to convert many unbelievers. Its humor is successful and unsuccessful by turns, and although Comedian Carl Reiner is the director, the instinct here is to give most of both credit and blame to Martin. The basic idea is clever: Martin is cast as the loving, beloved adopted son of a family of black sharecroppers. He is dumb as cow-flop and hopeless at foot shufflin' and finger snappin', but he tries hard. When he is ready to go out into the big world and his black mother (Mabel King) tells him that he was adopted, he is horrified: "You mean I'm gonna stay this color?"
On his way to fame and fortune he has goofy romantic collisions with a couple of formidable and very amusing ladies, a mean, mean carnival motorcyclist (Catlin Adams), who beats him up, and a virtuous cosmetologist (Bernadette Peters), who plays cornet solos to express her love. He makes and loses a great pile of money, and eventually is rescued from drunken bumdom by his black parents, who are now rich from the money he has been sending home. The rube role works fairly well when Martin remembers to play a harmless nitwit of the Jerry Lewis variety. But that really is not his kind of humor. During most of this film he is way out of character (so is his rough language). He does not impersonate a rube or a lovable nitwit; his twitchy, leering mug is that of a loony who may be dangerously mad, a secret aficionado of cat juggling whose gift is for making audiences laugh uneasily. That is to say that he is, approximately, a white Richard Pryor, and how about casting the two of them to gether in a remake of The Prince and the Pauper? —John Skow