[Simon is a Yugoslavian-born American film and theater critic. In the following review of The King of Comedy, he praises Scorsese's insights into pop culture fame and star worship, but suggests that ultimately the film's major themes are muddled by Scorsese's ambiguous attitude toward the protagonists.]

Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy is on to something important, if only its aim were clearer and its movement more sure-footed. Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is a 34-year-old messenger boy who desperately wants to be a comedian. Downstairs in his mother's apartment, where he lives, he has created a mockup of the Jerry Langford (read: Johnny Carson) Show, where, between life-size cutouts of Liza Minnelli and his hero and model, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), he practices his comic routines and talk-show blather. By helping Jerry out of the mauling clutches of rabid fans one night, then insinuating himself into the star's limousine, Rupert starts what he takes for a professional and personal relationship, and Langford for a mere mauvais quart d'heure. Not meaning it, Jerry asks for samples of Rupert's work; presently Pupkin is hanging around the Langford office's waiting room, sending in tapes, sticking around some more for results, and getting ever firmer, less polite, brush-offs from the staff.

Pupkin pursues his quarry—and his own goals—with the ineluctable doggedness that is an amalgam of uncritical self-esteem, total insensitivity to rebuffs, and a low-grade savvy that partakes less of intelligence than of marathon stupidity. With Rita, a girl he loved from afar in high school and who now works as a bartender, he goes for a weekend to Jerry's Long Island mansion, pretending to his date that he was invited. Thrown out conclusively, he plots, with someone even crazier than he is—Masha, a rich, weird-looking Langford worshipper and stage-door Johnny—the kidnapping of their common idol. It works, and Rupert demands as ransom a ten-minute monologue in the first segment of the Langford Show. And Masha? She tries bizarrely to seduce Jerry, whom they have taped as completely as a mummy into a chair in her absent parents' Park Avenue town house. By a series of comicsinister, clumsy-shrewd maneuvers, Rupert gets on the show, is a smash hit with his fairly awful monologue, goes to jail (a six-year term, of which he serves less than half), and comes out to become the dreamed-of King of Comedy. Jerry escapes from Masha, who pursues him through the Upper East Side in bra and panties like some ghastly Maid-enform Girl; Rupert isn't shown winning Rita, either; but, with his new celebrity, he ought to do all right.

The film, with a script by Paul D. Zimmerman, a former Newsweek film critic, is unsure of what it wants to do. Obviously, it attacks the power of the obscure and benighted, if not demented, over the stars they worship, emulate, and tyrannize in the attempt to become stars themselves. But Scorsese and Zimmerman seem uncertain in their attitude toward the Ruperts and Mashas of this world. Are they monstrously aberrant, or fairly typical, or even emblematic of universal stupidity and madness? Are we to shudder at them first in comic, then in real, horror, or are we to pity them for the perfunctorily thrown-in but undeniable implications of parental bullying or neglect they have suffered? Yet though there is a pathetic strain traversing Rupert's insuperable cockiness (he can sincerely deny his manifest ejection from a building to an eyewitness), and though there is a woefully lonely, infatuated girl in the homely and derangedly violent Masha, these characters lack the variety of detail to make us accept their contradictions as part of human complexity; rather, they remain grotesque caricatures (well-drawn, to be sure) on which we are jarringly asked to expend full-bodied compassion.

Still, these caricatures talk a good game. "Didn't anyone ever tell you you are a moron?" the exasperated Jerry blurts out in his country house as the butler is about to call the police and the apologetic Rita is summoning Rupert away, but the impermeable pest still refuses to leave. "I can take a hint," he finally concedes without budging, and adds, "So I made a mistake." "So did Hitler," snaps Jerry. Whereupon Rupert, with much-delayed hurt dignity: "So this is the way you guys are when you reach the top…. I'll work fifty times harder, and I'll be fifty times more funny than you." To which Jerry: "Then you'll have idiots like you plaguing your life." This dialogue has the proper ludicrousness and bite, but it is equally effective when Rupert is smarmy, dumb, or pitiful: "I see the awful, terrible things in my life and turn it [sic] into something funny." He is only mouthing a cliché, but, sad to say, there is the ache of truth in it; his comic monologue, which fractures the Langford Show audience, is partly based, we surmise, on genuine childhood traumas.

This is where things become particularly muddled. The monologue strikes me as only slightly less funny than most such monologues, which I don't find very funny either. Are the film-makers saying that Pupkin's comedy is junk, but that on the Langford Show, introduced by Tony Randall, it enchants an audience of Pavlovian fools? Or are they saying that Pupkin does have that minimal talent needed to make anybody's success in this abysmal business? Is the film about weirdos cannibalizing their betters, or are there no betters, and are large numbers of—if not, indeed, all—Americans a breed of imbeciles? Is the satire specific or all-inclusive?

If the latter, why doesn't the film prepare us for it? There are hints, but they are few and fuzzy. True, a middle-aged harridan talking on a street phone recognizes the passing Jerry Langford and, without letting go of the receiver, flatters him abjectly, extorts his autograph, but then, when he refuses to talk to her nephew over the phone, hideously wheels on the star: "You should only get cancer! I hope you get cancer!" Rita, mortally embarrassed at having been inveigled into invading Jerry's country house, nevertheless stuffs a bibelot from a side table into her pocketbook. Is this a pathetic attempt to recoup a little dignity, to have something to show for this unmerited humiliation; or is it, after all, simply a piece of thievery, giving even the seemingly decent Rita her dram of vileness? And why does Jerry have only office staff, domestics, and a lapdog, but no trace of family or friends? Is that the proverbial loneliness at the top, or is he, too, merely a Pupkin on a pedestal? He does appear to be self-contained yet seething with something within, but what: frustration, repressed arrogance, or a nagging sense of unearned success?

Occasionally, there are lapses from credibility in an otherwise laudable attempt to emphasize reality in some of its more surreal aspects, but reality nevertheless. Though I have seen the film twice, I still miss a proper explanation of Masha's having the family town house to herself on abduction night. No parents, no servants; only this unhinged girl, scarcely to be entrusted with the safety of so palatial a domain. Again, if Langford is so wildly popular as to be mobbed nightly at the studio exit, would he quite so regularly walk alone through New York's threatening streets? And what about Rupert's job and financial status? He can take endless time off his messenger work and, although he complains of insolvency, is a flashy dresser (his outfits sometimes clumsily aping Jerry's), owns fancy sound equipment, and seems wanting for nothing. The gag whereby we only hear his always offscreen mother hectoring him does not clarify his presumable economic dependency.

Yet despite vacillations, there are respects in which The King of Comedy displays more assurance than any previous Scorsese film. The intermingling of Rupert's daydreams of glory with his shabby reality is strikingly managed; Rupert's psychology, language, and demeanor are presented with accuracy and the appropriate discomfiting humor, somewhere between laughter and wincing; and De Niro's performance perfectly captures the manic persistence of the idiot savant. When Langford tells him that he cannot begin at the top—the Langford Show—but must start at the bottom, catch De Niro's delivery of the reply, "That's where I am, at the bottom"; he is magisterially both ridiculous and chilling in proffering a confession of failure as a badge of honor and qualification. As Masha, Sandra Bernhard succeeds in being both frighteningly derailed and childishly pitiable; as Rita, Diahnne Abbott plays a once-popular high-school cheerleader defeated by life with touching reserve. And Jerry Lewis's Langford—always wary, prickly, his face pulled in with uneasy self-control, like a waistline constricted by a Draconian belt—makes us squirmily aware of the constraints of fame. Minor roles are well taken, whether by celebrities playing themselves, little-known actors (notably the stunning Shelley Hack as Langford's cool secretary), or sundry members of the Scorsese family.

There is excellent production design by Boris Leven, the interiors of Jerry's two residences being particularly impressive in their expensively unlived-in-looking frigidity. Scorsese's handling of the camera, ably seconded by Thelma Schoonmaker's editing, is equally compelling in the vividly orchestrated sequence of Pupkin being chased through the Langford offices by the security staff and in the patiently searching closeups in which De Niro deploys Rupert's bestial blatancy with disarming innocence. Rumor has it that there was studio interference obliging the filmmakers to make the humor less black; but even if The King of Comedy is often closer to Mel Brooks than to Evelyn Waugh, it still says more than most current American films.