John Ritter becomes a Hero at Large on February 8, 1980


February 8, 1980. Mark it down, folks, because that was the day the Silver Screen coughed up something truly, utterly, and gloriously American onto the unsuspecting public. Forget your grimacing anti-heroes, your tormented auteurs, your foreign-film gloom! This was something else entirely, a cinematic confection as bright and unapologetically earnest as a freshly starched shirt on a Sunday morning. We’re talking about Hero at Large, a motion picture that landed in theaters with the subtle grace of a bowling ball dropped from a skyscraper.

And who, you might ask, was at the very epicenter of this particular cultural collision? None other than the gangly, grinning, rubber-faced maestro of physical comedy himself: John Ritter! Yes, that John Ritter, the man who, for the better part of a decade, had been tumbling and pratfalling and generally making a delightful spectacle of himself as Jack Tripper on "Three’s Company." This wasn't some Method-acting, inner-demon-wrestling performance, no sir! This was pure, unadulterated Ritter, cranked up to eleven and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

The premise? Oh, it’s a corker! Ritter plays one Steve Nichols, an out-of-work actor, a man adrift in the glorious, neon-drenched, vaguely anxious currents of late-70s Los Angeles. He’s got the looks (in a charmingly disheveled sort of way), he’s got the moxie (in a perpetually optimistic, almost naïve sort of way), but mostly, he's got nothing. Until, that is, he lands a gig shilling for a B-movie studio, playing the masked marvel known as Captain Avenger.

Then—BAM—the moment. Steve, still in the suit, stops off for a carton of milk at the corner grocery, and there it is: a stick-up in progress, two lowlifes waving hardware, the usual urban tableau of fear and fluorescent lighting. He doesn't think; he just does. One lunge, one disarm, one bewildered crook on the floor, and suddenly the guy in the cape isn't promoting anything anymore—he's news. Flashbulbs pop like champagne corks at a bad wedding. The tabloids go nuts. "Captain Avenger Lives!" the headlines scream, as if the city had been waiting all along for a masked savior to step out of the comic-book pages and into the slushy gutters of reality.

And just like that, in a single, magnificent, utterly unplanned stroke, a STAR IS BORN! Not the Hollywood kind, with agents whispering sweet nothings into his ear and publicists manicuring his image. No, this was the other kind, the kind that blossoms in the fertile soil of public imagination, fertilized by newspaper headlines and whispered rumors. Steve Nichols, the struggling actor, becomes Captain Avenger, the bona fide, flesh-and-blood, honest-to-goodness superhero!

Here's where the thing gets interesting, in that peculiarly American way. Steve Nichols doesn't just cash in on the fame—he starts believing it. He keeps the suit on. He patrols. He stops muggings, rescues kittens from trees (or the urban equivalent), all while the PR man (Bert Convy, taking a break between game show and Love Boat tapings) tries to orchestrate the chaos into something marketable, and the pretty neighbor across the hall (Anne Archer) watches the whole delusion unfold with a mixture of affection and alarm.

The city laps it up. New York in 1980—still raw from the blackout riots, the Son of Sam scars, the sense that the whole place might collapse under its own weight—suddenly has a hero. Not Superman, not some Kryptonian import flown in from Hollywood, but a local boy, a schlemiel in spandex who trips over his own cape half the time. Dr. Joyce Brothers shows up on talk shows to analyze the phenomenon: Is this healthy mass hysteria or the first faint sign of civic renewal? The crowds cheer. The polls spike. For a few weeks, anyway, the collective hangover from the Me Decade lifts just enough for people to pretend that one earnest do-gooder in a costume can fix what a decade of cynicism broke.

Of course it can't last. The machinery grinds on. A staged stunt goes wrong, the press turns, the pedestal cracks, and Steve finds himself exposed, ordinary again, the hero reduced to just another guy who tried to play dress-up in a world that chews up dreamers and spits out headlines. Redemption comes, as it must in these pictures, but not before the film has poked gentle fun at the whole American hunger for icons, for saviors, for anything that looks like meaning in a city that runs on noise and nerve.

Hero at Large wasn't trying to win any Palme d'Ors, mind you. It wasn't attempting to dissect the human condition with surgical precision. No, this was a film about something far more vital, far more elemental: the irresistible pull of a good story, the collective human desire for someone, anyone, to swoop in and make things just a little bit better. It was a movie that said, "Hey, maybe the hero isn't some muscle-bound demigod from another planet, but just a regular guy who happened to be in the right (or wrong!) place at the right time, wearing a silly costume." 

John Ritter—God rest him—brings to it exactly the right quality: not irony, not swagger, but a kind of wide-eyed decency that makes you root for the fool even as you know he's doomed to fall. Ritter playing it straight led to a child like me taking this movie more seriously than the makers intended. Captain Avenger was as much a superhero to me as Christopher Reeve's Superman and Reb Brown's Captain America. After seeing Hero at Large on broadcast television, I remember it being my favorite movie for a few months. And that premiere was much earlier than the September 11, 1983 airdate the internet claims today.

Yet, so it was that as the winter chill of 1980 gave way to the burgeoning spring, audiences flocked to see this peculiar phenomenon. They laughed, they cheered, and for 98 glorious minutes, they believed. They believed in a hero with a crooked smile and an even more crooked cape. They believed in the sheer, unadulterated, utterly American magic of a man who stumbled into greatness, one pratfall at a time. And that, my friends, is a story as timeless and as genuinely wonderful as a slice of apple pie on a Fourth of July afternoon.

Location: New York, NY, USA

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