Billy Crystal talks the way other actors move: fast, nervous, unable to stop. When Harry Met Sally... and City Slickers let us hear the worry under the patter. When a script gives him nothing to worry about, the patter is all there is.
Fi1m perspective
Harry Burns has barely met Sally when he starts explaining why men and women cannot be friends. He is not flirting and he is not arguing; he is certain, and Billy Crystal plays him as a man who has never been given a reason to doubt it. That is the Crystal habit in one scene. The joke is in his mouth before the thought behind it is finished, and the words come at a speed that suggests silence would be worse. Mike in Monsters, Inc. (2001) does it with one eye and still talks enough for two.
He came up through stand-up in the late 1960s, then television: Jodie Dallas in Soap from 1977 to 1981, a year on Saturday Night Live from 1984. The films arrived in the late 1980s, in support first, in The Princess Bride (1987), then in front, with When Harry Met Sally... (1989) and City Slickers (1991). Rob Reiner has directed him three times and gets the best of him. In 1992 he wrote and directed Mr. Saturday Night and played Buddy Young Jr., a stand-up going out of fashion; in 2004 he took a one-man show, 700 Sundays, to Broadway.
He needs someone in the frame who does not talk back at his speed. Meg Ryan listens and disagrees, and makes both feel as active as speaking, so Harry's theories land on something and stop. John Goodman's Sullivan is slower and softer, and Crystal's bustle gives him space to be so. In City Slickers, Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby have the competitive edge of friends who know how to get a laugh at one another's expense, and the film stops being a monologue. We laughed at Mitch Robbins's lecture on ageing, then felt low, because Crystal delivers it with such ease that getting older sounds like something Mitch has already decided he cannot enjoy. That is what he does that most comic actors do not: the worry is audible under the joke, when the script leaves a gap for it.
When it does not, the manner shows. A laugh line can be heard coming a beat before it lands, and the readiness that is funny in a man talking to cover his nerves is tiring in a man with nothing to cover. City Slickers keeps pressing its lesson about living better after Crystal has already made the point, and the script makes him say it anyway. His later dramatic work, the series Before (2024) most recently, has been received as a departure from the comic persona. We have not reviewed it. The evidence we have is the comedies.
He has said it himself: “Comedy was always serious for me. I can’t do much else.” The three films we have reviewed bear out the first sentence. Start with Harry, sure of himself within minutes of meeting her, and make up your own mind about the second.
Biography
Billy Crystal is an American actor, comedian, writer and director. He was born William Edward Crystal on 14 March 1948 in New York and grew up in Long Beach on Long Island. He studied theatre at Nassau Community College and film and television at New York University, graduating in 1970.
Crystal first gained prominence playing Jodie Dallas on the sitcom Soap (1977–1981). He became a film star in the late 1980s and 1990s with roles including Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally... (1989) and Mitch Robbins in City Slickers (1991). He provided the voice of Mike Wazowski in the Monsters, Inc. films (2001, 2013) and has appeared in The Princess Bride (1987) and the Analyze This films (1999, 2002).
Crystal has hosted the Academy Awards nine times. He also directed, wrote and starred in Mr. Saturday Night (1992) and Forget Paris (1995).
