Jack Nicholson Never Put on a Dress

Our favorite Moviehouse was a single-screen theater located downtown in the 1970s. It wasn’t so much the motion pictures we watched as it was this new breed of performers that shook the foundations of what we believed actors should be. Admittedly, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino had all been workaday actors, but some alchemy in the early and mid-seventies transformed them. And towering over them all like a brooding Titan, was De Niro. Holy crap, the guy purposely gained 60 pounds to portray boxer Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.”

For years, the name Robert De Niro was uttered in hushed reverence, while awe-struck peers were aching to share the screen with him. People would refer to him simply as “De Niro,” but never “Bobby” (only Martin Scorsese, who directed the actor in seven films could call him that). Then a funny thing happened. Or maybe it wasn’t so funny.De Niro played an “angster” (an angst-ridden gangster) who secretly consults with a psychiatrist, portrayed by Billy Crystal, in “Analyze This,” a 1999 comedy co-written and directed by Harold Ramis. “De Niro kids his screen image,” Roger Ebert noted, “from all those mob movies by Martin Scorsese and others.”

 

"You're good...No, you're good!"

When Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal reteamed with writer-director Harold Ramis for “Analyze That,” Roger Ebert deemed the 2002 sequel inevitable and unnecessary, commenting, “What seemed like a clever idea the first time feels like a retread the second.”

Robert De Niro, playing Fearless Leader in the 2000 computer-animated/live-action
comedy "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" (with Rene Russo and Jason
Alexander) parodies his famous "Are you talking to me?" speech from "Taxi Driver." 

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” the oft-quoted theatrical axiom, has been variously attributed to 19^th century British actor Edmund Keane, 19^th century American actor Edwin Booth, 19^th century wit Oscar Wilde, and playwright George Bernard Shaw. “Some people say that drama is easy and comedy is hard,” Robert De Niro once remarked. “Not true. I’ve been making comedies the past couple years, and it’s nice. When you make a drama, you spend all day beatin a guy to death with a hammer…On the other hand, with comedy, you yell at Billy Crystal for an hour, and you go home.”

In between the “Analyze” films, De Niro’s steely-eyed antagonism played well off Ben Stiller’s creepy man-child persona to the hit comedy “Meet the Parents” (2000), but as the sequels rolled out, more and more baggage – Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Jessica Alba, Harvey Keitel, Kevin Hart, Laura Dern – was piled on, and when the third movie came out, review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes lamented, “As star-studded as it is heartbreakingly lazy, ‘Little Fockers’ takes the top-grossing trilogy to embarrassing new lows.” When Robert De Niro received the Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globes, he said, “I was very, very moved and gratified when you made the announcement two months ago, well before you had a chance to review ‘Little Fockers.’” We’re still waiting for “Mother Fockers.”

“The Family” (2013) cast Robert De Niro in another send-up of his mob persona in a dark comedy about a Mafia family under the witness protection program. Costarring Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones, and directed by Luc Besson (best known for "Léon: The Professional” and “The Fifth Element”), the universally negatively reviewed film even stoops to have De Niro’s character participate in a film club discussion of “Goodfellas.” Entertainment Weekly noted, “At this point, Robert De Niro has built an entire subgenre of movies in which he sticks his tongue out at his cinematic legacy.”

That same year of 2013 found De Niro floundering in the flaccid senior-citizen buddy comedy “Last Vegas,” alongside fellow grumpy old men Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline. And now, movie trailers and posters are plastering images of a bare-chested, 72-year-old De Niro in his title role as “Dirty Grandpa.”

 

Zac Efron flexes under the watchful gaze of Robert De Niro in "Dirty Grandpa."

The problem with self-parody is that, in excess, it robs the actor of credibility and calls into question the sincerity of future performances. Look at what happened to Marlon Brando, a cultural icon once revered as the greatest motion picture actor of all time. Robert De Niro was once considered the heir apparent to Brando’s mantle, especially since De Niro portrayed the younger version of Brando’s “The Godfather” character in “The Godfather Part II.” Eighteen years after “The Godfather,” Brando delivered a dead-on parody of Vito Corleone in the 1990 comedy “The Freshman” (pictured below, with Matthew Broderick), which, for many of us, diminished the integrity of everything the actor strove for in the first place.

Marlon Brando, as he gained years and girth, squandered his once prodigious talent in a series of dismissible, mercenary, often self-lampooning roles, including an effete bounty hunter who dresses in drag as a frontier granny in “The Missouri Breaks” (pictured below), the Man of Steel’s supercilious pop in “Superman: The Movie,” Grand Inquisitor Torquemada in “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery,” a corpulent psychiatrist in “Don Juan DeMarco,” a mad scientist in “The Island of Dr. Morneau,” and an effeminate crime fence in “The Score,” costarring Edward Norton and Robert De Niro.

Robert De Niro dressed in drag when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in December 2010 (pictured below, with Diddy), and it wasn’t pretty. Nor was it funny. Cracking up in belly laughs onscreen with goodfellas Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci is one thing, but the trouble with De Niro is that when he tries to be funny on his feet, it’s awkward and stilted. Just recalling his strained banter with the guest of honor during the TV special “Don Rickles: One Night Only” in 2014 is enough to make a body squirm.

Great moments in drag cinema: (Left) Director John Huston's 1963 mystery romp
"The List of Adrian Messenger" closed with the unmasking of celebrity guest stars
disguised by master makeup artist John Chambers (best known for "Planet of the
Apes"), including Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and (above) Burt
Lancaster, as a female animal rights protester. (Right) In writer-director Philip
Kaufman's darkly sardonic "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" (1972), after
the failed bank robbery, Frank (John Pearce) and Jesse James (Robert Duvall)
successfully flee the state when Jesse dons the garb of a slain elderly woman.

On several occasions, Robert De Niro has been forced to trade quips with his former mentor, director Martin Scorsese, and the surprising result here is that despite his reputation for violent, blood-spattered mob sagas, Scorsese inevitably emerges as the bubbly, convivial raconteur, the guy you’d prefer to hang out with at a party over the washboard-stiff De Niro.

Some actors, regardless of prestige, just don’t have the chops for comedy. “A Countess from Hong Kong” (1967), sadly, the last film written, produced, scored and directed by Charlie Chaplin, trapped Marlon Brando in a lame pantomime of the Little Tramp’s silent-screen antics, and it was an embarrassing spectacle.

 

Director Charlie Chaplin shows Marlon Brando how to act
more like Charlie Chaplin in "A Countess from Hong Kong."

Paul Newman tried to play dumb and cute in the World War II service comedy “The Secret War of Harry Frigg” (1968). Don’t get us wrong, Newman can do comedy, but it’s the sardonic wise-cracking of Lucas Jackson in “Cool Hand Luke,” Robert Leroy Parker in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and Henry Gondorff in “The Sting” that provides him with his moments to shine.

“To put it simply,” one web reviewer noted of the star’s performance in “The Secret War of Harry Frigg” (pictured above), “Paul Newman gives it his all but can’t do dumb…doing stupid, the face-pulling and quirky mannerisms, is not his thing.”

Speaking of hush-hush military operations, the ramrod-spined Charlton Heston was cast against type in “The Private War of Major Benson” (1955) as a martinet whose future with the U.S. Army depends upon his ability to shape up the Junior ROTC program at a Catholic boys’ military academy. The comedic role took Heston out of his comfort zone as a granite-faced paragon of virtue as he dipped his toes in the heartwarming waters of sentiment, especially in the presence of the scene-stealing ten-year-old Tim Hovey, as the precocious Cadet Thomas “Tiger” Flaherty (pictured above).

Kirk Douglas was another old school studio actor not normally acknowledged with a flair for comedy, but he unleashed years of pent-up comic fury as Cactus Jack Slade, the titular live-action cartoon character in “The Villain” (1979), a slapstick western directed by Hal Needham (best known for “Smokey and the Bandit”), featuring Ann-Margret as Charming Jones and Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his first starring role) as Handsome Stranger.

Reviewing the movie in The New York Times, Janet Maslin remarked, “Kirk Douglas plays the Road Runner role, as he falls off cliffs or lights the wrong end of the dynamite or glues himself to the railroad tracks…Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that’s not after laughs but heehaws.”

Gene Hackman is another actor not normally associated with comedic roles, which made his unexpected cameo as Harold, the blind hermit, in “Young Frankenstein” (1974) all the more hilarious. Incidentally, Harold’s parting line, “I was going to make espresso,” was ad-libbed by Hackman; the scene quickly faded to black because the crew immediately burst into fits of laughter.

Gene Hackman goes for the cheap laughs in drag in "The Birdcage" (1996).