HIS NOSE FOR COMEDY PUTS HIM ON THE HIT LIST

When the New York Film Critics Circle selected Steve Martin as the best actor of 1984, it was as if Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss and some of the other elite names in American film criticism had shown up for a panel show on the Arts & Leisure channel wearing arrows through their heads.

What, were they nuts? Didn’t they see “Amadeus” and the emotional histrionics of Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham? Did they miss Sam Waterston’s guilt trip in “The Killing Fields” or the boozy madness of Albert Finney in “Under the Volcano”?

Not likely. Critics are filled with eccentricities, but skipping free screenings isn’t one of them. What happened was actually pretty simple. The critics asked themselves who gave the best performance that year--of any kind--and most of them said Steve Martin in “All of Me.”

The National Board of Review also selected Steve Martin as 1984’s best actor and he was a major contender with members of the National Society of Film Critics.

But those critical endorsements caused no more than ripples of bemusement in Hollywood where physical comedy not only isn’t pretty, but isn’t regarded as acting.

Martin was not even nominated for “All of Me,” a snub by the actors’ branch of the academy that stands him in good company. None of the great physical comedians of screen history--Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton--was ever nominated for an acting award.

Last fall, a few critics foolishly predicted a supporting actor nomination for Martin for “The Little Shop of Horrors,” in which he did an extended cameo as a sadistic dentist and managed the no mean feat of stealing the movie from a blues-singing anthropomorphic Venus flytrap.

Again, nothing from the academy.

“As a comedian, you must do silly things and silly things are not critically respected,” Martin said the other day during a lunch break on the set of John Hughes’ “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” at Paramount Pictures. “But it is just as hard to do silly things as it is to do dramatic things.

“The easiest thing to play as an actor in the movies is anger. It’s a strong emotion. Most people can get in touch with it. Yet that’s what you get Oscars for, crying and yelling.”

Martin, who is already being touted by some naive critics for a nomination for his current hit “Roxanne,” said he feels no bitterness over his snub by the academy three years ago. He said he accepts the academy’s narrow view of Oscar-worthiness, but the critics’ awards did raise his hopes.

“I would have turned handsprings to have gotten nominated for ‘All of Me,’ ” he said. “It was at a time in my life when I needed a confidence booster. Now, I feel I have proven something to myself. . . . It’s not as important as it would have been several years ago.”

If the academy follows form (clip this column out and test it next February), Martin will end up with a nomination for his script for “Roxanne,” but not for his performance in it. Writers have always been more inclined to recognize the serious thinking that goes into comedy than have the voting actors in the academy.

For the moment, Martin seems content with the wave of good reviews and the continuing box-office affirmation of “Roxanne.” Eight years ago, he was leveled by critics after making his film debut in “The Jerk.” (“We all want to feel our work is important, so how can a critic who wants to feel important give a good review to something called ‘The Jerk’ ?) Today, it is hard to find a dissenting opinion on “Roxanne.”

“I made a conscious decision (about reviews),” Martin said. “I feel so much pain over the negative stuff that I’m going to allow myself the luxury of feeling good over this positive stuff.”

In a way, Martin--or, Martin and fans of his unique gifts for physical comedy--have been the victims of timing. In the silent era, it is likely he would have been as big as Lloyd or Chaplin. In the studio contract era, he would have done dozens of movies in the time it has taken him to do nine.

By working more, Martin would have learned more, and faster. In an era where experimentation comes at a high price and where one miscue can derail a career, it has taken him nearly a decade to even discover the form--silliness with a purpose--with which he is most comfortable.

“ ‘Roxanne’ is my best picture because there is something very human about it,” Martin said. “ ‘All of Me’ is a good movie, but it was strictly for laughs. ‘Roxanne’ has that heartache underneath it. I like the structure of it, being able to dance around on top of this extremely sober, melancholy notion that runs through the play.”

Martin’s first solo screenplay, “Roxanne” is a modern telling of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” a 19th-Century tragicomedy about a nobleman who, but for an eyesore of a nose, would have had everything: grace, skill and the woman of his dreams.

Martin said he decided to update “Cyrano” because it had a solid story and four or five payoff scenes (“It was just a vehicle that I could be funny in”). But, as critics rose up nearly as one to say, it turned out to be a film of as much warmth and charm as of humor.

Martin’s Cyrano--a fire chief in a small Northwest ski town--is his best piece of conventional acting, by far. That may be due largely to direction from Fred Schepisi, an Australian with a list of fine dramatic films behind him, but no comedies.

For all of its other attributes, however, “Roxanne” works because of the physicality and unselfconsciousness of its star. Let’s see Sam Waterston or F. Murray Abraham carry a movie for 90 minutes with a 4-inch prosthetic nose jutting out, like the prow of a ship, from their faces.

It is Martin’s unself-consciousness, while often making a total fool of himself, that sets him off from the other physical comedians working in film. Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy and Chevy Chase have all had greater box-office success, but each gives the impression that when he is alone, he is with his most adoring audience.

With Martin, you’re watching something akin to self-abandon. When he came out on the stage in his stand-up days, wearing a tailored white suit and styled hair, and talked about how his hands would grow at parties because he didn’t know what to do with them, you saw his hands grow!

Suddenly, this coiffed gent was wearing rabbit ears and twisting tubular balloons into the shape of what he said--before he placed it on his head like a tiara--was a staphylococci. Then his feet would get happy, or he would do something with a rubber fish, or say, “Here’s something you don’t often see,” then jump up and down with his fingers in his mouth.

Boy, you sure didn’t see that very often.

Martin’s physical comedy--his ability to make people laugh without language--has evolved into something as sure-footed on the screen as a Fred Astaire spin on the dance floor. His early comedies, made mostly with the very inconsistent Carl Reiner, were underachievers, but there were moments from each that will make great clips some day for a Steve Martin tribute.

There are no greater moments from Martin, or from any other comedian in modern times, than the scene in “All of Me” where his character first attempts to walk after half his brain has been taken over by the stubborn spirit of a dead middle-age virgin.

Not only do the two sides of his body want to go in different directions, but in different gaits--one male, one female.

There is nothing in “Roxanne” that approaches the bravura comedy of that scene in “All of Me,” but the smaller pleasures add up. Martin’s mannerisms--the gangly gestures, the rubbery facial expressions, even the whininess in his voice--are imbedded in the collective moviegoer unconscious. We are cued to laugh from the moment he appears.

Martin said it makes for good intellectual sport trying to analyze why a certain person’s humor works, but he has resolved the issue to his own satisfaction by attributing it to the “X-factor”-- the unidentifiable element that gives any artist’s work its personal style.

Martin doesn’t think of himself as a physical actor, but as “an actor working within comedy.” And it is clear from “Roxanne”--and even in moments from the routine 1984 comedy “The Lonely Guy”--that he has come a long way as an actor since “Pennies From Heaven,” a brilliantly directed and produced musical drama that suffered from Martin’s having been miscast in the lead role.

Even then, audiences were primed to laugh at Martin--on sight--and they were often laughing at the wrong time.

Martin regards “Pennies From Heaven” as the right movie at the wrong time. Maybe after “Roxanne,” in which he demonstrates his ability to develop a full character, maybe audiences would accept him in a dramatic role.

But he said he isn’t longing to prove himself in the dramatic ring. Being funny is what he does best; the idea is to find vehicles with good stories that he can be funny in for a full 90 minutes. Such films as “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Man With Two Brains”--even “All of Me”--are hung on gimmicks, and no amount of audience goodwill can sustain gimmicks long.

“Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” which is scheduled to wrap on the Paramount lot Wednesday and be released at Christmas, pairs Martin with John Candy in a road movie about an advertising executive (Martin) and a traveling shower-ring salesman (Candy) who face a series of transportation horrors trying to get from New York to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving.

Martin said he has no other movies scheduled right now. He’ll work on scripts, and read some. And he may slip into a back row to see “Roxanne” with audiences now and then. Listening to the laughter, he says, is the “big payoff.”

“I was in a theater the other day looking at ‘Roxanne.’ I looked down and saw a 12-year-old kid sitting there laughing his head off. I saw myself. I was about 12 when I saw ‘Cryano’ with Jose Ferrer. I thought to myself, ‘Geeze, this kid is genuinely affected. This is going to be with him for a long time.’ That’s really something.”