'The Life of Reilly': Full, Funny Portrait

"The Life of Reilly" lets Charles Nelson Reilly, above, tell his own story by showcasing his autobiographical one-man show in 2004. (Civilian Pictures)

Don't laugh. Charles Nelson Reilly, best known as the go-to guy for campy zingers on 1970s game shows, was much more than that. Reilly, who died in May, was also a serious actor, revered acting teacher and respected director, as well as a classic American success story.

You can hear all about it in "The Life of Reilly," Frank L. Anderson and Barry Poltermann's engaging documentary of Reilly's fabulous one-man show, which was born of a three-hour extemporaneous speech to an acting class in the 1990s. Filmed at a 2004 performance, Reilly delivered an alternately hilarious and poignant autobiography in that characteristic hectoring squawk, recounting early years growing up in the Bronx and Hartford, Conn., with a family that was one part "You Can't Take It With You" and one part Eugene O'Neill.

The dominant force in his life then was his mother, Signe, an indomitable, bigoted Swedish woman who berated her son with only slightly less venom than the Jewish and Italian kids she shooed away from him. In one of the show's most extraordinary moments, she talks her husband, a gifted poster artist for Paramount Pictures, out of a potentially brilliant and lucrative career move. Instead, after Reilly's father was institutionalized for alcoholism, the family decamps for Hartford, where they take up residence with Reilly's lobotomized aunt and other eccentric relatives. "How do you think I felt being the odd one in a family like that ?!" he yells at one point.

Throughout the monologue, Reilly "casts" his own life (Shirley Booth for Signe, Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow for her parents), and the filmmakers insert quick film clips, as well as stock footage and animation, to provide a witty and welcome visual counterpoint to the talk.

As unhappy as his family life was, "The Life of Reilly" doesn't indulge in bitterness. Instead, Reilly focuses on the teachers, mentors and friends who believed in him from the beginning, making it possible for him to move to New York, at 18, full of optimism. (In one of the film's most moving sequences, he recounts introducing a childhood friend's elderly mother to Yiddish theater star Molly Picon.) Early on, he enters an acting class in 1950, and the roster reads like a thespian Who's Who, from Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara to Steve McQueen and Hal Holbrook, who even then was playing Mark Twain in schoolrooms for $25 a pop, hauling his costume around in a paper sack. ("Get a bag," Reilly deadpans when recounting his advice to acting students.) When a television executive informs Reilly that he'll never work in that medium because they don't hire "queers," he proceeds to prove him wrong, beginning with "The Ghost & Mrs. Muir" and ending with 106 appearances on "The Tonight Show."

If "The Life of Reilly" has a flaw, it's that it gives short shrift to Reilly's directing career (he was nominated for a Tony for directing Julie Harris in "The Gin Game") and glances only slightly at the teaching to which he became increasingly devoted, with the support of longtime friend Burt Reynolds. But Reilly himself never drew much attention to those achievements. With such a voluble but still self-effacing star at its center, "The Life of Reilly" makes a valuable contribution to a record that could easily have been forgotten or reduced to a few double-entendres on "Match Game." Throughout "The Life of Reilly," the star recounts how, whenever he asked his mother an awkward adolescent question, she would snap back, "Save it for the stage." Thank goodness he did.

The Life of Reilly (84 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated. It contains adult themes. Co-director Barry Poltermann will answer questions about the film after screenings on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. and Monday at 7:40 p.m.