Hero at Large (Kings Road Entertainment, MGM, 1980)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 7:15 p.m. yesterday (Sunday, September 15) my husband Charles and I settled in for a number of films on Turner Classic Movies, including Hero at Large, a 1980 romantic comedy from MGM and Kings Road Entertainment. Directed by Martin Davidson from a script by A. J. Carothers, Hero at Large stars the late and underrated John Ritter as Steve Nichols, out-of-work aspiring actor in New York City. He’s living in a grungy apartment building in a seedy section of New York and he meets a new neighbor, Jolene “J.” Marsh (Anne Archer), who works as a member of the crew on TV commercial shoots. Naturally he’s smitten with her at first sight, while she can’t be less interested in him and in fact already has a boyfriend, Milo (Rick Podell), who has hired her for several assignments. The relationship is a bit on the rocky side because – stop me if you’ve heard this before – he wants to control her entire life. Steve crashes an after-hours commercial shoot she’s working for at Sardi’s restaurant (it had to be after hours because that’s the only time Sardi’s would rent their space to the crew). He finally gets his big break when he’s one of 62 sporadically employed actors enlisted by publicity agent Walter Reeves (Bert Convy) to promote a new superhero action movie called Captain Avenger (whose posters proclaim its star as “Ryan McGraw,” a clever mashup of the two leads from the 1971 film Love Story, Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw) by dressing up in Captain Avenger costumes and visiting theatres showing the film. Steve is on his way home from this gig when he stops into a bodega for a quart of milk. The elderly Jewish couple who own it are already in the process of closing for the night when he persuades them to reopen just long enough for him to buy his milk – and just then a couple of thugs burst in and try to hold the place up after first pretending to buy a six-pack of beer. (Charles chuckled when the male partner behind the counter quoted $2.79 as the price for the whole six-pack. Now you’d be lucky to find one beer for sale at that price – and people complained about inflation then!)

He tells the robbers to stop in his best imitation of a Captain Avenger voice, and he startles them enough that after a brief scrap (one of them had a knife but neither had a gun), they give up the robbery and flee. The incident gets reported all over the city but nobody can figure out who the mystery man in the Captain Avenger suit was – much to Steve’s irritation, since he could use the career boost from being a real-life hero, albeit for just a few minutes. Steve gets another chance when he’s out driving a taxicab (he’s a “relief driver” after hours in what appears to be his one reliable, if itself sporadic, source of income) and a gang of drug smugglers tries to run him off the road. He fights back and runs them off the road instead, and when the real police arrive at the scene they discover a large quantity of cocaine or some other illegal drug in the baddies’ car. Walter Reeves is also the publicity agent in charge of the re-election campaign of the Mayor of New York (Leonard Harris), and he and his contact in the Mayor’s campaign, Calvin Donnelly (Kevin McCarthy, who in 1956 played the lead in the first – and still by far the best – film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), work out the idea to find the mystery man who’s playing Captain Avenger in real life and exploit him. They have to go through all 62 men they’d hired before they find him, and when they do Steve, like a Frank Capra hero (the second half of the film is largely a knockoff of Capra’s 1941 near-masterpiece Meet John Doe), is initially reluctant but finally goes along, lured by the promise of a starring role in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Needless to say, his actor’s ego is flabbergasted at the thought of following in the footsteps of Paul Newman and Ben Gazzara.

Steve breaks up a fake “robbery” on a New York subway – and feels rotten about the deception. He confesses this to J., who’s become his girlfriend after their landlady, Mrs. Havacheck (Anita Dangler), locked Steve out of his apartment for non-payment of rent and J. took him in, platonically at first but not for long. Ultimately the Mayor decides to hold a huge ceremony to honor the mystery “Captain Avenger,” but a reporter (Penny Crone) has figured out the whole scheme and landed an interview with the actor who played the “robber” in the staged subway holdup the alleged Captain Avenger supposedly “foiled.” She directly confronts him at the Mayor’s big ceremony and Steve rather disgustedly walks away – until director Davidson and screenwriter Carothers rip off yet another old classic film, Mighty Joe Young. Wearing an overcoat to conceal his now-embarrassing Captain Avenger costume, Steve comes across a major fire at an old apartment building in which a woman successfully is rescued (the fire chief on the scene is played by Kenneth Tobey, yet another veteran of a 1950’s sci-fi classic, The Thing) but she’s understandably concerned that her son is still in the building. Unable to enter the building at ground level, Steve gets in by going to the roof of an adjoining building and leaping across to the top of the burning one, where he goes in and after four failed tries finally finds the apartment where the son was hiding out. He takes the boy to an open window and throws him down where the firefighters have a net waiting for him, then follows and has to wait for the firefighters to reset the net so he can leap from the building to safety. It ends the way you’d expect it to, with Steve and J. together and Steve morally redeemed by his actual heroism.

Hero at Large isn’t a great movie, but it is a genuinely charming one and it has things to say about Americans’ obsession with both celebrity and heroism. In one scene pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers appears as herself on a TV show debating whether the alleged Captain Avenger’s actions are good or bad (good, she says). TCM showed it as the second half of a mini-festival to John Ritter, who got “typed” from his eight-year run as the male lead on the TV sitcom Three’s Company (playing a man who pretended to be Gay to be allowed to live in an apartment with two women; it was reworked from a British TV show called Man About the House, though in the British series the man really was Gay). The first film was one I’ve long been curious about: They All Laughed, directed by Peter Bogdanovich and co-starring Audrey Hepburn and the short-lived Dorothy Stratton, a Playboy centerfold who was trying for a career in films. She and Bogdanovich drifted into an affair during the shoot, and after the film was finished but before it was released Stratton’s psychotically jealous husband and manager, Paul Snider, brutally murdered her. (The case became the basis for Bob Fosse’s last film as a director, the woefully underrated Star 80.) I’m sorry we missed that one and even sorrier they didn’t show what I think is Ritter’s best film, Americathon (1979), a brilliant political satire in which Ritter plays President Chet Roosevelt, who faced with an intractable economic collapse decides to bail out the U.S. by hosting a giant worldwide telethon. It got terrible reviews when it came out but didn’t deserve them!