The Jerk

TCM ran a two-night salute to actor Steve Martin back in May, which gave me the chance to watch one of his movies that, somewhat surprisingly, I had never seen before. That movie is the one which made him a movie star in addition to his TV and stand-up comedy work: The Jerk.

Steve Martin unsurprisingly plays the titular jerk, although his character isn't so much a jerk as a man named Navin Johnson who's just so profoundly naïve that you wonder how such a person could ever survive in the real world. As the movie opens, in fact, he's a bum with little to his name except the clothes he's wearing and a thermos, and he tells the other assembled bums how he wound up in this condition.

Navin was a foundling left on the porch of a family of very poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi (although, as a shot just before the closing credits reveals, it's the Universal backlot as we can see the Magnificent Mountains of Mississippi in the background). His adoptive family are good people, except that they haven't been able to bring themselves to tell him before now that he's not their biological child, let alone not black. When they do tell him, he feels he has to make his way to St. Louis to find his true purpose in life.

Navin gets hired as a gas station attendant at a station run by Harry Hartounian (Jackie Mason), where he deals with robbers before meeting inventor Stan Fox (Bill Macy, not to be confused with William H. Macy). Navin has come up with an idea for a device that will prevent eyeglasses from slipping down your nose, and Stan offers to find a buyer for the idea. But Navin has to leave the gas station when a crazy sniper (M. Emmet Walsh) tries to kill him.

Navin next makes his way to a traveling carnival where he's seduced by fellow carny Patty (Catlin Adams) before meeting fairgoer Marie (Bernadette Peters), who is sweet and just the right person for Navin, although they can't get married yet because Marie wants someone who can provide for her, which Navin can't do yet. At least, not until Stan finds him to let him know that his invention has paid off and boy is Navin going to be rich. Not that Navin has any idea what to do with the money: you'd think he goes bankrupt through overspending. And yet, that's not really what happens. He loses his fortune in a different way, and here I'm not exactly spoiling things considering that the movie opens with Navin as a bum telling us how he ended up that way. So you know things are going to go wrong somewhere.

A lot of people love The Jerk, and it's easy to see why. At the same time, the movie opened to mixed reviews, and I think that's easy to see why too. Not that this is so much a movie that divides critics and audiences the way movies do today depending on the political or culture war message the movie is trying to make. Instead, The Jerk is more of a showcase for Steve Martin's comic stylings than it is a movie with a fully fleshed-out plot. At times it feels like more of a series of episodes than a coherent whole. And Martin hadn't learned to tone things down the way he would in later movies, especially where he had a better script. So I definitely have some issues with The Jerk.