The Jerk

The Jerk begins with its hero in the gutter. Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) sits on a Hollywood pavement in a torn suit, tells the camera he is not a bum but a jerk, and explains how he got there. The tagline promises rags to riches to rags, and Carl Reiner’s film delivers that, with little interest in the middle part. For an hour it is as funny as anything American cinema made that decade; for the last half hour it is a man in a big house running out of things to do.

The script, by Martin, Michael Elias and Carl Gottlieb, puts its best material first. Mabel King, as Mother, breaks the news of Navin’s adoption as gently as a woman who has put it off for years, and Richard Ward, as Father, sends him off with a speech of advice delivered without a flicker. Dick Anthony Williams’s Taj and the family sing on the porch while Navin claps on the wrong beat; Reiner holds the shot, and the joke gets better the longer it runs. At the petrol station, M. Emmet Walsh’s Madman picks a name from the telephone book and opens fire on the oil cans behind Navin’s head. We laughed until it hurt, and we cannot explain why. Something to do with Martin’s conviction that the man’s quarrel is with the cans.

Victor J. Kemper shoots it flat and bright, like a television comedy. Nothing in the frame competes with the gag. Jack T. Collis’s production design gives Navin a series of boxes to be innocent in: a petrol station, a carnival trailer, a mansion with a fountain. Theadora Van Runkle dresses him in trousers that stop above the ankle and, later, in white suits with the sheen of a car showroom. Jack Elliott’s score keeps out of the way. Ron Spang and Bud Molin cut fast and do not wait for laughs, which is a kindness in the first half and a problem in the second, when the scenes have no shape.

Martin had been a stand-up comedian for years, and Navin is his stage persona given a body and a birthplace: the man in the white suit delighted by everything and understanding none of it. Navin is not stupid so much as new, and Martin plays every scene as though it were the first thing ever to happen to him. Bernadette Peters, as Marie, the cosmetologist he meets at the carnival, matches him by playing it straight. Their duet on the beach, the old song Tonight You Belong to Me on ukulele and horn, is the tenderest thing in the film, and it caught us off guard. Two absurd people are being sincere at each other, and the film lets them.

The carnival section brings in Catlin Adams as Patty Bernstein, a stunt rider who takes Navin in hand, and Dick O’Neill as Frosty, who runs the weight-guessing stall. Each is given one joke and plays it well. What follows, and how the money arrives, we will leave alone; once Navin has everything, the film has nothing for him to want. The set-pieces get larger and slower, and Reiner starts to rely on Martin doing funny things in expensive rooms. It is still amusing. It is not what came before, and at 94 minutes the drop is over quickly.

One more thing. The opening act gets a good deal of its comedy from a white man not knowing he is white in a Black family, and the jokes work because the joke is always on Navin’s blindness and never on the family, who are the sanest people in the picture. Mostly that holds. Once or twice the film reaches for an easier laugh, and the laugh does not come.

Against the run of plotless American comedies, The Jerk sits high because of the first hour and no higher for the last. The loudest praise since has called it one of the funniest films ever made; we would stop at the first hour and mean it. Watch it with someone who has never seen it, and watch their face when the new telephone books arrive.