The Pick-Up Artist

Another of the movies that I recorded during one of the free preview weekend was the light 1980s comedy The Pick-Up Artist. It's going to be on again, at 5:24 AM tomorrow on StarzEncore Classics, so I watched it to do a post on it.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Jack Jericho, a not very successful man for a bunch of reasons. He lives with his grandmother Nellie (Mildred Dunnock) in a New York apartment where he can't pay the rent; presumably his parents died when he was young which is when he started living with Grandma, but now she's elderly and you wonder how much longer she can live. But that's not what the movie is about. Jack is also a teacher in danger of losing his job.

But Jack's biggest problem is the way he treats women. He tries out terrible pick-up lines in front of the mirror, and then when he goes out into the real world, he has the audacity to try these lines on random women he meets. One would think there's no woman out there nuts enough to respond positively to these lines, but I suppose it's a corollary to Rule 34 that anything you can think of is going to be a turn on for somebody. Indeed, Jack has a sheet of paper with the names and phone numbers of a ridiculous number of women on it.

One day, Jack meets Randy Jensen (Molly Ringwald) and, after some attempts finds that the lines work on her, more or less. It gets her into his car and then Central Park where they have sex, but she's not about to reveal her last name or give him his phone number. So what does Jack do? He starts stalking her, and finds out that she works as a guide at the Museum of Natural History. Jack goes to the museum and books a tour for his students, specifically requesting Randy as the guide.

You'd think that would turn off Randy even more, and unsurprisingly, she's very unwilling to pursue a relationship with Jack any further as she points out during the tour. Jack can't be bothered to take "no" for an answer, so he continues to stalk Randy, finding out that she lives out near Coney Island, with her father Flash (Dennis Hopper). Flash is an inveterate gambler who's racked up a $25K debt with gambler Alonzo (Harvey Keitel), who wants the debt paid off immediately, if not sooner.

Amazingly, Jack is too stupid to figure out that Flash and Randy are father and daughter. But after helping Randy to get rid of the debt collectors, there might be a flicker of hope for him with Randy. But she was always Daddy's good luck charm when he gambled, so she thinks she might be able to go to Atlantic City and win the money that Dad owes Alonzo.

When Jack finally figures out where Randy has run off to, he gets his good friend Phil (Danny Aiello) and Flash and follows to Atlantic City, hoping for some way to help out Randy. But can they ever really love each other?

The Pick-Up Artist is the sort of movie that I think 50 years earlier would have been made -- cleaner, of course -- as a B movie. The idea of somebody like Jack meeting a working girl and then having everything spiral out of control over the course of 48 hours is something that seems like it would fit in in the Depression; a movie like The Girl from 10th Avenue sprung to mind. This more modern plot is full of plot holes, but the two leads make the threadbare material work. It's also nice to see Mildred Dunnock near the end of her career.

If you like 80s comedies, then The Pick-Up Artist will probably entertain you for its 80 or so minutes. It's nothing particularly great, but it's not quite as bad as its IMDb ratings, either. A search of the TCM Shop and Amazon says it's not on DVD, although you can watch it on streaming video.