Michael J. Fox has gotten his obligatory “serious” role out of the way, in Light of Day. In that film, notoriously gloomy director Paul Schrader made the sunny Fox seem glum.
Secret of My Success was filmed immediately after Light of Day (last summer, during Fox’s summer break from TV’s “Family Ties”), and the young actor looks as though he’s had a heavy weight lifted from his shoulders. Secret restores Fox to his customary cheeriness, in a role tailored to his light comedic talents.
The film is like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but without the songs. Fox plays a Kansas farm boy who heads out for New York to make his first quick million. Disaster strikes soon, as his job falls through, but he lands a mailroom gig at a conglomerate owned by his ruthless uncle (Richard Jordan).
With an eye to accelerated upward mobility, Fox occupies an empty executive office, invents an alias, and carves a niche for himself as a phantom executive. He also complicates things by attracting the amorous attention of the boss’s lascivious wife (Margaret Whitton) and a comely executive (Helen Slater).
Of course all of these complications are going to explode in his face at the end, like clockwork. And clockwork is the word: the screenplay by A.J. Carothers, Jim Cash, and Jack Epps Jr. has all the soul of a Swiss watch, but without the craftsmanship. Cash and Epps are the team that gave us Top Gun and Legal Eagles, and the secret of their success seems to be in carbon-copying former successes.
The director, Herbert Ross (The Goodbye Girl), is lost. He tries much too hard to make “funny” things happen, such as the embarrassingly juvenile limo ride Fox gives Whitton, which becomes a collection of sexual innuendos.
In both Secret and the current Blind Date, there’s a scene near the end with all the main characters gathered at a house at night, sneaking around in each other’s rooms. In Blind Date, you know exactly how the room are laid out, who’s where, and what it will mean if the wrong person is found in the wrong spot. And it’s very funny. In Secret, Ross shoots the same scene so confusingly, you have no idea what’s going on. He kills the comedy, even though he’s straining for it.
What makes the film occasionally amusing is Fox himself, whose likability (and innate sense of timing) emerges unscathed. He does some good takes with Whitton (she starts singing leering songs to him, and he responds, “A medley? How nice”), and is adept at physical comedy. In particular, the film’s only good running gag is some business with elevators, which Fox uses as a dressing room as he ping-pongs from his mailroom to his executive job. But even that has its ups and downs.
First published in The Herald, April 15, 1987
One of those asshole-upward-striving-yuppie movies from the 80s. Was a big hit for Fox, who followed this up (still bound to “Family Ties”) with Bright Lights, Big City and Casualties of War, which, even though two Back to the Future films were around the corner, did a lot to puncture his moment. I’m doing a little Andrew Sarris thing there, comparing two directors and parallel sequences, which I think is fair in this case. Jim Cash died in 2000, and Jack Epps Jr. doesn’t have any credits on IMDb after that, having taught at USC in recent years.
WHAT A FEELING! 