Can you name a Steve Martin movie? Of course you can. If you were around for the early parts of his career you’re probably familiar with the crazed screwball classic The Jerk or his SNL performances and multitude of comedy albums. If you came of age in the 90s you’ve almost certainly been acquatinted with VHS family classics like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And if you, like me, are in your 20s then your childhood was probably populated with his later efforts like The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen, films that would re-run on TV seemingly interminably. Suffice to say, Steve Martin has been one of the most recognisable comedic performers for generations.
Despite his slapstick performances being recognised by each generation, his films are not always intergenerational. When conversation turns to the topic of Steve Martin, the window of films mentioned by people my own age is often quite narrow. The mentioned Panther and Cheaper films are usually ubiquitous among Gen Z and they can often be the only films that someone can mention when asked about Steve Martin. The acerbic and deeply unserious collaborations between Carl Reiner and Martin are by and large completely alien to people of my own generation while a thirtysomething comedy lover may hold a deep nostalgic reverence for such comedies. While each generation may associate different childhood classics with the comedian, there are broad overlaps in his performances.
With reference points that are quite limited, a certain caricature of Steve Martin is created through the collective conflation of his films. In films like Father of the Bride and Cheaper by the Dozen, Steve Martin is caught in the middle of a family comedy that attempts to stretch a glaringly overt, thin premise across the length of a feature length film. In these films (which can be seen in Automobiles too), Martin is the father stretched too thin. These absurd familial pressures (“I have too many kids!” and “My daughter is getting Married?!?!”) create stressful scenarios that test him repeatedly, his growing frustration and apoplectic outbursts humouring the audience.
Cheaper and Bride do not have much else to offer beyond their casting of a comedy star and, even then, these films are not exactly teeming with inimitable and exciting comedic set pieces that put you in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. These totemic films can run a little on the stale side. They rely so heavily on Martin exercising his old physical comedy box of tricks; he hangs from a building after meeting his daughter’s in-laws, he flies through the air at his new neighbours birthday party. Martin’s performances are not a detriment to these films though he is unable to elevate them beyond their lacklustr comedic material.
It can be argued that this face that Martin wears, the curmudgeonly father, is the most recognised persona dawned by the performer across his career, more so than the bumbling conman (Bowfinger and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) and the idiot (¡Three Amigos! and The Jerk). Despite this, in The Pink Panther, a film that aligns itself more with Martin’s “idiot” archetype, he gives a performance that could work as a gateway to the more esoteric and interesting aspects of Steve Martin’s career.
In The Pink Panther, Steve Martin…flies through the air and hangs off of buildings. However, it is evident that the humour and tone of the film is much more inspired and focused. Steve Martin portrays the iconic fool Jacques Clouseau, a smalltime French policeman who has been promoted to the highest rank of detective on account of his exemplary ability to repeatedly fail at every aspect of his job. The reasonings for said promotion are convoluted and superfluous; all that the audience need be aware of is that there has been a murder at an insanely public scale and a particular luminous ring encrusted with a protuberant pink diamond has been stolen and only one man (Clouseau) has been tasked with tying up each of these loose ends.
The film, which Martin co-wrote, should perhaps have been more aptly named ‘Clouseau’ as the film does not deal with his mischievous, pink counterpart and dispels any notion of building upon its laid out murder mystery framework. Instead, The Pink Panther feels more like an adaptation of a series of American cartoon shorts called The Inspector that deal solely with the aforementioned Clouseau as he continuously runs into insane quibbles around a colourfully strange Paris with his timid and ill-equipped sidekick Deux-Deux (In Martin’s Pink Panther, he is accompanied by Jean Reno as his appointed sidekick Ponton).
The antics in The Inspector are particularly ridiculous and are heightened through it’s chosen medium of animation and though The Pink Panther does not reach the unprecedented heights of absurdity as in the cartoon, Martin’s egregiously butchered French accent and the way in which the film plays out as a series of farcical vignettes does reflect the cartoon quite astutely. This film is also worthy of the negative epithets that have clouded its reputation for almost two decades now; clumsy, childish, hollow. What should be gleaned from this film is not Martin’s inability to form a cohesive plot but rather his penchant for absurdity and choice of intriguing source material that should come into focus.
When I’ve told people that Steve Martin co-wrote The Pink Panther they usually are surprised but it mainly reinforces a presumption: “I suppose Steve Martin wrote a lot of his own movies”. This is quite a fair assumption based on the given example of the Panther films as they do feel quite anonymously written (lacking a distinctive auteurist voice), though, Martin’s written efforts prove to be a small yet eclectic grouping of films that, in areas, remain undiscovered by a mainstream audience and show weird, intriguing and utterly sincere aspects to the comic’s artistic milieu.
My favourite of Martin’s written efforts, Roxanne, is perhaps his most astoundingly strange yet sincere work. Based on the famous turn of the 20th century play Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxanne follows C.D. “Charlie” Bales (Steve Martin), the head of the local firemen squad with a noticeably long nose which hinders his confidence. In a hermetic Northwestern town, called Nelson, he pines after the newest addition to the wonderfully weird town, Roxanne (Daryl Hannah). Any attempt at a romantic advance by Charlie is dashed as Roxanne falls for the more conventionally attractive Chris (Rick Rossovich). When Roxanne tells Charlie of her budding attraction he first contemplates having his nose surgically altered but pivots, deciding to get as close to Roxanne’s romantic gaze as he can be permitted by aiding Chris in romancing Roxanne.
Martin, along with directer Fred Schepisi, find comedy in the fabric and characters that make up the very specific and idiosyncratic town of Nelson that feels like a sister town to Lynch’s Twin Peaks or David Byrne’s Virgil, Texas in True Stories. Like the incapable Sheriff’s department in Twin Peaks or John Goodman’s sensitive yet goofy performance in True Stories, Roxanne is colourful and humorous thanks to it’s supporting characters and secondary aspects. Fred Willard, who can brighten any film, gives a small but charming role as the town’s mayor, however, Martin’s brand of absurdity really culminates in Nelson’s fire department. The ungainly set of firemen are introduced through a montage of them being trained to do the most quotidian aspects of their jobs, though, their bashful natures and comical unawareness circumvents any shot at progress. Their fire hoses exert more control over them than they do the hose and they must be enthusiastically encouraged and comforted to slide down a fire pole. Essentially, they’re more capable of starting a fire than they are of putting one out. Each gag builds upon the other, the visual language used often resembling that of silent comedies, until the utterly unqualified fire squad is called into action toward the end of the film. Roxanne builds a very atypical but inviting comedic tone that feels entirely singular.
The lighthearted absurdity of Roxanne acts as an inviting and appealing exterior to the film’s purely earnest and swoon-worthy romantic core. As Charlie helps Chris in pursuing Roxanne, the dimensions of each of the men are revealed; Charlie’s internal romantic depths and Chris’s limited emotional capacities. Charlie writes confessions of love to Roxanne while purporting as Chris in order to codify a relationship between the two. Of course in Charlie’s letters he writes honestly about his feelings for Roxanne. This falsified dynamic is actualised in a scene that proceeds a date between Chris and Roxanne where Chris defies Charlie’s directions and fumbles his words, revealing his prurient intentions and vapid interiority. Charlie summons Roxanne to her balcony and ducks quickly behind a tree in order to obfuscate his visage and, by extension, his elongated nose. While pretending to be Chris, Charlie seeks to make amends and tells Roxanne how he mistakes the majestic sound of a flock of birds taking flight for the sound of somebody calling out her concise and evocative name that has become ingrained in his mind. At a point, his love has made him so awestruck that he can repeat but only one word: “Roxanne, Roxanne”.
In this scene, Charlie’s words transcend his appearance and his delicately crafted admissions of love for Roxanne can exist in their purest form. This separation from the self also works as a metaphor for Martin expressing a desire to be seen as more than just a comic. Martin’s expressive and detailed face lends itself innately to comedy and has defined his career; it’s hard not to get excited and charmed when he enters a scene. In Roxanne he obscures his face with a prosthetic and in the aforementioned scene he demands the audience take his sentimental, poetic ramblings seriously. No comedy is played throughout the scene, Martin is lost in the romance. He proclaims the words, which he actually wrote, with a true sense of desire and sincerity. As the camera shows Martin’s face surrounded by leaves and branches, reflecting Roxanne’s perspective, in a way it can be said that just as Charlie wishes Roxanne to see his love for her as pure and transcendent, Martin bares his romantic inclinations to the audience.
Martin’s peculiar blend of the absurdity and the romance was delightfully reinforced a couple years later in L.A. Story, which Martin also wrote. While there is a central romance in L.A. Story, the primary love story is between Steve Martin and Los Angeles. As Schepisi did with the fictional town of Nelson, director Mick Jackson colours L.A. vividly, highlighting the city’s vibrancy and, in addition, its superficiality. What is at stake in L.A. Story is the relationship between these very apparent yet contradictory attributes and how one city can stand for so much and yet, so little.
Though not plot heavy, the film follows Steve Martin as Harris Telemacher, a burnt out “wacky weatherman” whose marriage is transparently fickle. Amongst all of the two dimensional cronies which Harris surrounds himself with, one of whom is having an affair with his wife, he meets the eyes of Sara McDowel (Victoria Tennant). Sara is a journalist from London who has come to write a piece on the enigmatic L.A. as well as to see her on-and-off husband Roland Mackey (Richard E. Grant).
Diverging from Roxanne slightly, Martin’s typical kookiness blurs the lines between the comedic and the romantic in L.A. Story. When all askew and in search of answers Harris comes across an electrical Highway signpost that speaks to him directly. Before pulling over to investigate his car, Harris tells us in a voice over “There are two events in my life that I consider to be magical…the first of them was about to happen”. The signpost beckons Harris to listen and explains itself: “I C PEOPLE N TROUBLE & I STOP THEM” it reads, “L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U” the sign continues. This, literal, sign helps to guide Harris to both romantic and career fulfilment though it also works as a dialogue between Harris and the city itself. This glorified highway sign resembles the city’s industrial artificiality but charms us with its hip use of abbreviations and inventive use of bulb lights to animate its phrases. Among the thousands of other highway signs and within its metal frame, there lies endearing qualities and a spark of magic.
Even in how Martin portrays L.A.’s own absurdities there is obvious love. People rattle casually around a restaurant during an earthquake and the first of Spring marks the first day of “Open Season” on the crowded L.A. freeway where road users are permitted to utilise their firearms to beat the traffic. Nobody is being criticised in these skits. They do not contain the vitriolic satire that is bountiful in John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. which shows a city that has been made barren by its inhumanity. While in Carpenter’s L.A. plastic surgeons have become Godly butchers, the superficiality is just part of the drive to work for Steve Martin.
In the end, Martin cannot help but be a romantic with the love story between Sara and Harris. When Sara asks what he’d do to stop her plane from leaving L.A., Harris retorts “if I had the power, I would turn the winds around, I would roll in the fog, I would bring in storms, I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn't work.". Martin wears his vulnerability so unabashedly in L.A. Story that it’s hard to believe he would go on to write a scene in The Pink Panther where Clouseau fumbles a viagra pill around a hotel bathroom so that he can sleep with Beyoncé.
The blend of absurdity and unashamed romance that is present in both Roxanne and L.A. Story are gemstones that sparkle brightly amongst the numerous accomplishments across Steve Martin’s career. His career holds within it so many layers that even to view the two mentioned films as “the sincere subplot” to his otherwise slapstick career would be incorrect. The comedian throughout his career has tried his hand at a variety of dramatic roles (The Spanish Prisoner, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk). While such efforts have not always proved to be especially interesting or compelling, the embracement of these roles echoes Martin’s willingness to subvert his comic persona.
In a film like Pennies from Heaven, a truly bizarre and hypnotic Depression Era set film, Steve Martin dances, breaks down, cries and lip-syncs to various Bing Crosby tunes. Having not done this in any previous film it is utterly shocking to see him perform each of these dimensions with such grace and ease. He amazes as he glides through the gorgeous and superbly crafted Hollywood-Golden-Era inspired dance setups and he breaks your heart as he expresses so much inner turmoil so subtly on his face. It is a performance that astounds and is utterly singular, even just because of the fact that no other role demands such range from an actor.
These films and performances are each ripe for discovery in their own ways and still feel unique even in a contemporary context. They show dimensions to a career that so many would be quick to label as one note or simply comical, something that we all are guilty of. To witness an artist go beyond what has defined them is inherently admirable and, in the case of Steve Martin, his more sincere efforts prove to be a quaint yet richly emotional set of films that remain to be widely discovered.
Wounderful work Robert, one of the best actors never to have received an Academy award nomination?