DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Steve Martin hamming it up as ‘Ruprecht’ is the latest pick-me-up movie we’re celebrating
DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS — a fine film, a funny film, an inspired double-act in the form of Michael Caine and Steve Martin — it’s always a pleasure. Around half an hour in, though, for five blissful minutes, there is a self-contained package of pure joy. Steve Martin’s Prince Ruprecht is a hall-of-famer, a comic invention so perfectly realised, so wonderfully stupid, so gloriously ridiculous, it’s a thrill to behold, a guaranteed pick-me-up again and again.
A pretty faithful remake of the 1964 caper Bedtime Story, starring David Niven and Marlon Brando as con artists fleecing fortunes out of a succession of women, director Frank Oz’s film goes through the same motions with the Ruprecht sequence, in which Martin’s Freddy poses as Lawrence’s (Caine) idiot brother. In order to send Lawrence’s potential wives packing after they’ve parted with their money, he needs to be an unbearably off-putting companion. Brando’s Ruprecht did the job, but Martin’s reinvention is something else.
We hear him before we see him, banging pots in his basement man(child) cave. And then there he is, his face scrunched into a stupor, his hair greased to oblivion, little more than a trained chimp, tyre tellingly swinging as he attempts to look presentable, not having any idea what to do with his limbs. A toilet sits just next to his bed, below a birdcage; hanging from a wardrobe, a cowboy outfit next to a ballerina’s tutu.
Much of what Martin does here was either invented by him or improvised, and his performance is a physical masterclass. Every movement is profoundly absurd. The way he skips so sprightly and fearfully across the room when threatened with the “genital cuff”. His aggressive petulance as he delicately flicks dishes and jugs off his mantelpiece. Even the way he spits out his apple sauce at dinner — like a baby — is a delight, while Ruprecht’s ecstatic urination (a skit Martin used to do during his old nightclub acts) has the actor doing things with his face that God did not intend.
Ruprecht is a celluloid antidepressant. To watch him is to grin constantly. He is an absolute balm.