Jeremy Herbert
Stop me faster than a speeding bullet if you’ve heard this one. New York City’s costumed savior has fallen. The captive audience, a central-casting cross-section of urban bustle, assumes the worst. And then, one by one, they become their best. Ordinary heroes hoist their unmasked champion back to his feet and, once he’s strong enough to stand again, step aside to let him disappear, just another face in the greatest crowd in the world.
No, it’s not the subway scene from Spider-Man 2; this one sees the hero charging into a burning tenement after firefighters throw in the towel, but it’s also not that scene from Spider-Man. Hero at Large beat them both to the punch ten months before Superman II, when a superhero comedy had so little material to work with that the next best thing was Taxi Driver.
But Steve Nicholls is no Travis Bickle, and he’s not just a nice guy, either. Even his agent’s diagnosis of “double schmuck” falls magnitudes short—the man is John Ritter.
He leaks audition opportunities to rival actors and congratulates them for landing Schlitz commercials at his expense. Instead of ruing a spurned invitation for late-night pie, he slinks his arm around the nearest homeless person and dines them instead. When his would-be girlfriend asks if he understands why she’s focusing on herself for a while, he sheepishly says, “…no.” In hands with any more dirt under the nails, it’d be a called shot for the decade’s stalking-as-romance trend. From Ritter, it’s the admitted defeat of a benevolent alien baffled by our strange Earthling courtship rituals.
Janet Maslin spelled out his genetic code in the first line of her polite pan: “If John Ritter weren’t already a successful television star, he could become the greatest camp counselor this country has ever known.” The Three’s Company breakout opens one of the only surviving interviews for Hero at Large by waving hello to his “Uncle Booty and Aunt Danny” and wraps it up by admitting his deepest fears: “Well I just come right out and say ‘Hey, I got nothing to hide, man, I’m scared to die, I’m scared to live.’”
Mortality hasn’t much crossed the mind of Steve Nicholls, struggling actor and absentee cabbie. The poor bastard even finds a silver lining in any respectable thespian’s worst nightmare circa 1980: playing a superhero. “Two years of Actor’s Studio for this?”, laments another Hamlet-hopeful recruited to play Captain Avenger in a theater lobby near you. But Steve is a true believer—in the gig, his fellow man, and the Captain’s catchphrase, which he recites along with every commercial: “Who says nice guys finish last?” This guy is preternaturally nice enough to withstand all slings and arrows, like an embryonic Kevin Bacon showing up for twenty seconds to call him the f-slur; it’s not played as a joke, just the ambient radiation of these familiar mean streets.
Todd Phillips’s Joker may painstakingly recreate the neon sleaze of Taxi Driver, but Hero at Large works it in like stained wallpaper the last renters left behind. In his only other film credit, legendary street drummer Gene Palma keeps spinning his sticks for an audience of none. Off-duty cabs crowd the Belmore Cafeteria like black-and-yellow bugs to the zapper. Leonard Harris plays another rinse-and-repeat politician whose graze with a vigilante almost forces him to have an opinion. When Steve thwarts a bodega stick-up in his workday spandex, the crime feels as regular as the L line.
Given the PG rating, Nicholls doesn’t avenge any child prostitutes, but Hero at Large treads murkier waters than our current superhero-industrial complex or even the “film the whole family can enjoy” that Gene Siskel deemed it to be. There is no evil mastermind here, only cultural infantilization as focus-tested by god of gameshows Bert Convy, styled like Blofeld dropping in on Super Password. Before searching for the real hero among his fakes, he nixes all gay and Jewish candidates on principle: “Captain Avenger is a WASP.” His eventual offer on Ritter’s soul comes with an action figure deal. All he has to do is stage some heroics to boost Captain Avenger’s box office and shake hands with Convy’s other major client, the floundering mayor. Culture’s days are numbered by sequels, with even the kind that grows on manhole lids to be rinsed off and replaced by “pop.” When the journalists finally lock and load their pencils, they don’t take aim at anyone with keys to the magic kingdom; they open fire at the starving artist who needed a gig to get his apartment unlocked.
And yet, Steve Nicholls saves one more day anyway. Hero at Large is not an artifact of a simpler time, just one less homogenized. The fictional billboard for Captain Avenger is dwarfed by a real one hailing Frank Langella’s arrival as Dracula. The sexual politics between Steve and Anne Archer’s red-headed girl next door, who transactionally dates a coworker before enjoying a one-night-stand with him as a better decision she doesn’t feel like making right now, would be safely quarantined to a bawdy straight-to-streaming rom-com today. This is a real movie that occasionally involves superheroes, as opposed to a superhero movie that occasionally involves real people. Ritter isn’t compelling because he’d make a good Spider-Man—and at this exact moment, he absolutely would’ve. He’s compelling because he makes a better camp counselor than taxi driver. The costume is just for show.
“Hero at Large” is available for digital rental or purchase, and is streaming with ads on Tubi, Vudu, the Roku Channel, and Plex.
