2. Rupert Pupkin/Masha - The King Of Comedy (1983)
It seems inevitable that, in our celebrity-fixated world, hostage-taking might be motivated by something more ephemeral than the age-old demands for money or sex (or even love). What about status, fame, or the sense that if a person doesnt figure in the mass medias version of reality, then they somehow dont really exist? It took the movies a little while to come round to that point of view, which is why, when Martin Scorseses The King Of Comedy debuted, it seemed quite a radical proposition - as well as being one of the independent maestro directors least successful films (at the time - its since built up a cult following). In many ways it was a product of its time. Though film critic Paul D. Zimmermans screenplay was written over half a decade before either event, it reflected an era when deluded, celebrity-obsessed gunmen Mark Chapman and John Hinckley, Jr. respectively shot dead John Lennon and wounded President Reagan and his aide, James Brady. But Robert De Niros Rupert, while wielding a gun and potentially dangerous, is ultimately no killer. His abduction of his TV idol, talk-show host Jerry Langford (comic actor Jerry Lewis - leaving behind his idiot-boy persona and exhibiting a rare darkness), is a means to an end. For Pupkins existence is a series of one-handed imagined monologues aimed at celebrities (including Liza Minnelli, Scorseses girlfriend of the time), and forcing Langford to let him enter their world at gunpoint is a fair trade-off, as he sees it, for the imprisonment that will certainly follow. In this, Rupert Pupkin is a more benign cousin of De Niro and Scorseses Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver - the movie that inspired the deranged Hinckley to shoot the president. And just as that Scorsese/Paul Schrader classic ends with a coda to Traviss gun rampage that may be a figment of his imagination (his acceptance as a hero by the media and the woman he desired), so The King Of Comedy posits that, post-prison, memories of the night Rupert commandeered a Late Show-type slot at gunpoint ensure interest in him as a TV interviewee and auto-biographer. It all seems to bear out his own ethos: "Better a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime." As an accomplice to the self-made celebrity Pupkin, special credit also belongs to Sandra Berhhard (comedienne/actress/onetime rumoured squeeze of Madonna) as Masha. The statuesque performer put on a convincingly sympathetic show as the celebrity groupie who thinks shes going to woo Jerry Langford while hes bound with duct tape only for him to cold-cock her (as our American cousins call it) when he gets his hands free. Back in the mid-eighties, the box-office failure of The King Of Comedy granted it an early debut on the UKs Channel 4, where Scorseses static camera and use of long shots made it work very well on TV.
Paul Woods
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Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
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