TCM ran a Carl Reiner film festival the other night. He wrote and directed some pretty amazing movies, but the one in their lineup that fascinates me most is “The Comic.”
There’s something just substantially unnerving about this film. For starters, when you pair Carl Reiner (who directed and co-wrote) with Dick Van Dyke, you’re expecting this:
But “The Comic” is a complete 180 from the world of Rob and Laura and Buddy and Sally. It is a dark, dark film about the life of a silent movie comedian. There are moments that suggest “black comedy”, but there is so little to laugh at that when a laugh is elicited it seems oddly out of place.
Billy Bright is a fresh-faced ex-vaudevillian who wants to make a go of it in the movies. He meets silent film comedy mainstays like “Cockeye” Van Buren played by Mickey Rooney. Reiner recalls:
This subject is actors who can’t do what you want them to do. Second movie called THE COMIC with DICK VAN DYKE which AARON RUBEN and myself wrote, about silent movie comedian. Based on people we knew. Character called Cockeye. We hired MICKEY ROONEY because if you can get MICKEY ROONEY for any part you get him. One of the best actors that lived. Perfect for Cockeye. We rehearse scenes, says a week before shooting in rehearsal, I can’t cross my eyes. I thought it was a joke. I’ll teach you. Couldn’t do it. Make up man a genius. We got a prosthesis made, a cockeyed prosthesis, contact lens. We found out too that he’s allergic to things in his eye. No more than 10, 15 seconds without his eye getting so red you couldn’t shoot for rest of the day. We had to devise a way. [INT: Did you think about changing the name?] No, we wanted to evoke the times, cockeye, BEN TURPIN, our tip of the hat to the insensitivity people had.
Billy befriends and eventually marries Mary Gibson, another actress in the company. Here’s their wedding day:
Soon Billy begins sleeping around and, at his creative peak. Mary files for divorce. This leads Billy to alcoholism. In a drunken rage he drives his car through the front door and up the stairs of his ex-wife’s home….except he’s drunk, so he rammed into the neighbor’s house by mistake. His ex lets her new husband adopt the son she and Billy had together. In a desperate move Billy grabs the boy and runs for it…but it turns out he’s got a neighbor kid and not his son…because he never sees his son and therefore doesn’t know what he looks like. I should point out that none of this is played for laughs; there is not even a hint of humor.
Dark enough yet?
Billy’s agent gets him a talkie but Billy says no. “Comics aren’t supposed to talk! They’re supposed to act!”
Here there is a time jump of 35 years or thereabouts. Billy, now elderly with thin, wiry hair and a face that has been ravaged by time and self-abuse, spends his days with Cockeye, playing guessing games and going to see their old one-reelers at the Silent Movie Theatre.
After placing an ad in the newspaper saying he will take any theatrical job, he is booked on a late night talk show hosted by brilliant ad-libber and obvious toupee-wearer Steve Allen…where the hip, current guest stars on the panel can barely contain their derision at the old-timer.
As a result of his Steve Allen appearance Billy Bright gets a regular gig making detergent commercials. This, like so many story elements of “The Comic”, is based in fact:
Now flush with some cash, Billy gets entangled with some hoochie and her mother (the mother is played by Pert Kelton, the original Alice Kramden in the earliest “Honeymooners” sketches). At the wedding Billy has a heart attack; the mother and daughter bring the preacher to the hospital; Billy is unconscious so there will be no wedding.
And now we come to the “1969 was a different time, kids” portion of the review. While getting some fresh air on the hospital lawn, Billy (with old friend Cockeye in tow) is visited by his grown son Billy Jr., played by Van Dyke in a dual role. Billy Jr. is, we are cued to understand, extremely gay. Mincing walk, effeminate speaking style, flamboyant wardrobe. When Billy Jr. exits making Jack Benny’s walk, this exchange assures nobody misses the boat:
COCKEYE: You know what Billy? One day that boy’s gonna make you a grandfather.
BILLY: Don’t hold your breath.
Dark! It’s a dark movie. And it ends dark:
Oof. This movie doesn’t get screened very often, and for some reason I had recalled him dying in front of the TV set…but he doesn’t. The dying would have been a happier ending.
As far as the performances, Dick Van Dyke does a fine job recreating the slapstick of silent cinema…and plays the character’s highs and lows quite well. It’s just such a different performance from his usual fare. Mickey Rooney is reliably goofy where he has to be and a great reactor to the meltdown of his friend over the course of the film. Michele Lee doesn’t have a lot to do here, but she’s fine. This film is loaded with great cameos–in addition to the aforementioned Pert Kelton and Steve Allen, we get Ed Peck (better known and despised by “Happy Days” fans as Officer Kirk) as a Hollywood mogul speaking at Billy’s funeral; Gavin McLeod as a director; Carl Reiner as Billy’s agent; Isabel Sanford as Billy’s co-star in the detergent commercial and others I might be missing. I think that’s game show host Geoff Edwards introducing the movie at the end.
“The Comic”. Yes, it’s incredibly dark. But it’s also very accurate in its portrayal of life in front of the camera, even in those supposedly simpler days of silent movies.