Burned-Out Star

Many custard pies have been thrown in the face of the silent-movie business, but few as sour as The Comic. If its advertisements are to be believed, the movie is simply a fond lampoon of Hollywood's pride-and-pratfall epoch. As the film unreels, it becomes in fact a furious editorial about a business that treats its veterans like overexposed celluloid.

An ex-vaudevillian, Billy Bright (Dick Van Dyke), clicks in silent two-reelers and becomes a national figure. Producer-Director-Writer Carl Reiner gives Van Dyke almost enough of this plot line to hang himself by strutting and capering in the manner of Mack Sennett's mute screwballs. Such flickering shenanigans are the most comical part of The Comic, but they are also the most derivative. The film gains its validity and poignance when Billy Bright reaches a crossroads and veers to the wrong. Sound movies are bunk, he decides, and abruptly the humor fades to black.

The industry grows up; Billy grows old. Sans hair, sans teeth, sans wives, sans everything, Billy Bright wanders from park bench to wheelchair replaying his memories to another burned-out star, Cockeye (Mickey Rooney). But Billy is no screen-size Pagliacci. Instead, he proves to be a garrulous embarrassment who keeps popping up on TV commercials and late-night talk shows. Audiences had thought him long dead; now they wish he were.

The Comic is damaged by Sunday Supplement color and cutting that might have been done with garden shears. Perhaps as a consequence, Columbia Pictures decided to hold it at arm's length, a flop to be forgotten. A flop, perhaps. Forgotten, hardly. For The Comic contains the most ambitious performance of Van Dyke's career, a resolutely unglamorous close-up of a string-necked, right-wing Angeleno, faded by sun and circumstance.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely unmistakable. In appearance, Cockeye obviously recalls Ben Turpin, and Billy Bright subtly evokes Buster Keaton. In actuality, the melancholy story is closest to that of the late Stan Laurel. The bitterness of The Comic arises from an incident in 1963, two years before Laurel's death, when Van Dyke decided to mimic Stan in his TV series. "We wanted to pay him for the rights to use his character," recalls Reiner, then producer of the show. "And we found that the rights belonged to another human being. The rights to the man's own personality! It was easy to get angry after that." It is to Reiner's credit that he was able to propel his anger with so much force. It is to his studio's debit that for the film's first run Reiner was not able to fling it farther than second-run movie houses.

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