So, pig-sick and blank-eyed from your Big Brother goons, your Pop Idol spudheads, your Wife Swap morons? Here's the anti-venom. A peeled, gutted and feather-plucked turkey on its original release ($2.5-million box office from a $20-million budget) and a critical punchbag (Pauline Kael: "Grossly insensitive, coldhearted... It's a bad movie"), The King Of Comedy's revival is a wonderful, alarming thing: wonderful because it harbours one of De Niro's choicest turns; alarming because its prescience stings even sharper in today's wannabe-gorged media. In other words, for every year that passes, Scorsese's bad apple ripens in reverse.
De Niro's rarely been as fully loaded as he is here, a spectacularly deluded, perma-grin fame-junkie going by the name of Rupert Pupkin who, along with Sandra Bernhard's terrifying, rapacious fan-grrrl, kidnaps Jerry Lewis' talk-show host for his own mercenary ends. The result is a volatile, none-more-black, jowl-ironing comedy where the laughter's released as a slow-motion Munchian scream. As for Scorsese, he plays the stylistic straight man, taming his familiar hyperkinetic edits to wallow in some exceptional, super-drawn-out cringe-sequences: the will-the-pain-ever-end scene in which Pupkin arrives at Jerry's mansion, unannounced and ready to party, will have you squirming like a willy in vinegar. Forget the cult tag. It's a bona-fide classic.
DVD Extras:
By all accounts, The King Of Comedy was a brittle shoot, none more so than when a Method-rapt De Niro got Lewis in the mood by repeatedly spraying him with Pupkinesque anti-Semitic rants. Still, you wouldn't know it from the 20-minute doc featured here. Made decades after the film's release, it's talking-heads-with-benefit-of-hindsight, Scorsese and Bernhard (ou est De Niro?) waxing on Pupkin's "levels of hostility" and the movie's prophecy of celebrity mutating into a "self-serving monster". As for deleted scenes, just the two: a hasty offcut of Jerry jostled by yet another maniac and Lewis' monologue from pin-sharp chat-show pastiche The Jerry Langford Show. Disappointing.
