Steve Martin spent forty years playing men who try too hard, and wrote many of them himself. Beside Martin Short in Only Murders in the Building, he plays straight, and is quieter and better for it.
Fi1m perspective
Charles-Haden Savage wears a blazer he never undoes. He once played a detective on television and has been dining out on it for decades, and Steve Martin plays him buttoned, lonely and faintly ridiculous, letting the loneliness through in small doses and the ridiculousness in smaller ones. It is a long way from the act that made him. The stand-up of the 1970s was absurdist and physical, built on props and old vaudeville turns, and it went out of its way not to land the punchline where you expected one. Little of it survives in the Arconia, where he plays straight and is better for it.
He has always written. He started as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967, before the stand-up, and when the films came he co-wrote the first big one. The Jerk (1979), which Carl Reiner directed, is the loud phase, and it made him a film star; he and Reiner went on to make four films together. Roxanne (1987), his own version of Cyrano, is the turn: a quieter man who could carry a romance. Planes, Trains and Automobiles the same year put him opposite John Candy in a road comedy, and it is still the film people reach for when they argue he can act. Father of the Bride (1991) settled him into fathers, and the later ones ran to formula. By Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) the exasperated straight man had become the whole performance.
The best of him needs a partner and a script he has had a hand in. In Only Murders in the Building (2021), which he created with John Hoffman, he has both. Martin Short plays Oliver Putnam as a man who cannot say good morning without blocking it, and Martin stands next to him and does less. We were more moved than we expected by Charles alone in his tidy beige flat, and Martin does it with almost nothing: the blazer kept buttoned, the flat too tidy. The same double act, voicing Seti's priests in The Prince of Egypt (1998), stops a serious film dead each time it turns up. It is not badly done. It is in the wrong film, and the act does not work in a film that does not want it.
He described the idea for the series without fuss: three neighbours who "didn’t have the energy to go downtown, so they would only do murders in the building". That is a joke about age from a man who has found a use for it. If you go back to the films, start with Roxanne, where he wrote himself the part he was best suited to. Then watch the series one episode a night, with someone who will do the Oliver voice at breakfast, and notice how often Martin is the one not talking.
Biography
Steve Martin is an American actor, comedian and writer. Born Stephen Glenn Martin on 14 August 1945 in Waco, Texas, he was raised in California. He began in entertainment working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, later studying theatre at UCLA. His early writing credits include The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, for which he received an Emmy Award.
Martin gained prominence as a stand-up comedian in the 1970s before transitioning to film acting. He is known for roles in The Jerk (1979), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) and its sequel, and The Pink Panther (2006). He co-created, wrote for and stars as Charles-Haden Savage in the series Only Murders in the Building (2021–).
