The Secret of My Success (1987)

"I'm sorry, Mr. Foster. We need someone with experience."

Director
Herbert Ross

Cast
Michael J. Fox - Brantley Foster
Helen Slater - Christy Wills
Richard Jordan - Howard Prescott
Margaret Whitton - Vera Pemrose Prescott
John Pankow - Fred Melrose
Fred Gwynne - Donald Davenport
Gerry Bamman - Art Thomas
Carol Ann Susi - Jean
Drew Snyder - Burt Foster
Elizabeth Franz - Grace Foster

Michael J. Fox's 1987 not-Back to the Future movie, "The Secret of My Success," is a film I'd never seen before. I only watched it because my wife and I have a movie night together a couple of times a month. We searched the long and seemingly endless corridors of streaming services, as we often do, looking for something we either haven't seen before or that at least one of us hasn't seen in years.

So, on our last movie night, I picked this flick completely out of curiosoity as it has Michael J. Fox alongside Helen Slater. 

I wanted to like this movie. I wanted to. It's a movie about intelligence, determination, working for something, and the American dream. I'm all for that!

The part that I hated was how empty it unintentionally makes it all seem. 

The story follows Brantley Foster (Michael J. Fox), fresh out of college. He moves out of his parents' house on the Kansas farm to find a successful career in finance in New York City. 

Of course, finding that dream job is met with a lot of companies turning him down for lack of experience. However, before leaving Kansas, his mom gives him the name of his uncle, Howard Prescott (Richard Jordan), whom Brantley has never met. So, in dire need of employment after being turned down multiple times at interviews, Brantley pays his uncle a visit at his huge office building.

After some begging, Howard hires Brantley to work in his company's mailroom.

In no time after starting his new job, Brantley starts deceiving the corporate higher-ups in an attempt to work his way up the corporate ladder undetected. 

He juggles this deception with inserting himself in the middle of office politics, business rivalries, and a budding office romance with Christy Wills (Helen Slater), who is a financial genius just like he is. But as she's so well established in the upper ranks of the company, Brantley finds out his uncle has put her close to himself for a specific reason.

So, Brantley has to keep this daily charade going, meandering under the pseudonym Carlton Whitfield so his uncle/boss doesn't catch on. Brantley just needs to weasel his way upwards and implant himself into a permanent, well-paying, upper-level position. And, as expected, comedy ensues.

Fox's comedic performance is entertaining and hilarious. He gives his character charisma, which makes him likable even though he's really a big liar. He's not just telling white lies. These lies are big friggin' lies with bells and noise makers hanging off them. I think the audience is expected to overlook Brantley's serious flaws because he's young, charming, inexperienced (albeit book-smart), and energetic. That's Michael J. Fox for you. His reactions go from being skittish and apprehensive to simply going along with whatever mishap falls in his way so long as he reaches his goal. It's a bit reminiscent of his character Alex Keaton from the sitcom "Family Ties." So, I see why he would be cast as a young, fearless, ambitious financial know-it-all.

It's an underrated performance, but I understand why that is. The movie crumbles all around Fox.

His role, and the story in general, is a comedic take on the American dream. And within this particular dream is a contrast between hard work and manipulating the system.

Underneath all this white-collar "success" is nothing but crap: adultery, deceit, empty and unfulfilling materialism, and the sad, stupid justification that a person has to do whatever they've got to do to make it in the business world. It all seems empty.

I admire the hard work and determination Brantley undergoes, albeit comedically, to bypass the standard "experience needed" job requirement, which those just-out-of-college jobseekers have to work around any way they can to get through the front doors of the working world. But his success is all founded on unsavory tactics sprinkled with comedy to make it palatable.

The movie is definitely a product of its day. The 1980s was a decade where financial success seemed within reach. The economic uncertainty of the 1970s morphed into an optimistic period thanks to market expansion. This was the Reagan era. People wanted the big offices. Women also wore big hairdos with lots of Aqua-Net. Ambition was high.

If Gen Z could only understand the satisfaction and payoff of hard work and dedication. They seem to have a habit of recording themselves crying (literally) at the prospect of working and needing to make sacrifices in order to support themselves and earn a living, and then share it on social media to garner likes and sympathy. "Soft" isn't a big enough word. But I digress.

So, in the most general way I admire Fox's character's determination to really make something of himself despite the stumbling blocks that fall in his way. No excuses. Eye on the prize!

However, the success Brantley achieves seems empty and not very glorious despite the glitter. It's satisfying seeing him win while the greedy corporate suits are knocked down several pegs and get a taste of humble pie. But what will he do with it once he gets his financial success? Will it improve him in any way? It doesn't appear like it will. 

Of course, Brantley wins the love and affection of Christy. Even that romance begins with lies and other unsavory ways.

The chemistry between Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater isn't there. It's more awkward than charming. Together, they look like a teenager and a mature career woman who has seen more things than a respectable lady should. This romance felt very forced. It didn't work.

Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater prove that

charisma isn't always transferable.

As this flick came out in 1987, a much less noble characteristic of the '80s was the idea that a meaningful relationship starts with sex sooner rather than later. And this is supposed to be admired and applauded.

I walked into this movie having only heard of it, but I didn't look into it beforehand to see what I'd be getting myself into.

I'm not bashing the pursuit of success, nor the attainment of it. I respect anyone who works hard and reaps the rewards of their hard work, even if they become millionaires, billionaires, or now that it's apparently obtainable, trillionaires.

The corporate white-collar world is a world that has replaces the soul with just about anything else.

So, the movie's depicted definition of success seems souless.

By the third act, the movie desperately tries to get the audience to laugh, but the comedy has dried up by then. So, the movie resorts to slapstick-style humor to get laughs. All I could think about at that point was how much the third act drags on. Nothing about this flick feels original. Rather, it feels more like a plot written thirty years earlier and then rehashed with a style and tone suitable for the decade.

"The Secret of My Success" has a good portion of entertaining comedic moments. It's also interesting to watch this right now as a photographic look at what corporate America was like back in the 1980s albeit in a satirical way.

Despite Michael J. Fox's more-or-less enjoyable and funny performance, it's rather harsh for a movie to ask audiences to like a character who goes from boyish and ambitious to depending on lies and deceit to succeed. Brantley comes from a Midwestern, probably Christian, background, too. It's not stated as such, but it can easily be interpreted that way since his farming parents aren't terribly excited to see him scurry off the farm and head to New York City in order to find ultimate success in the financial world. And this is what he so quickly resorts to. 

I can't say I'd recommend "The Secret of My Success." Again, I wanted to like it. In the end, the movie's definition of success felt dishonest, icky, and superficial. It also ran out of jokes! What kind of comedy runs out of jokes? 

All in all, this flick succeeds at nothing. 

Fiddler on the Roof (1971) - Correcting my personal cinematic blindspots

"Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as... as... as a fiddler...on the roof!"

Director
Norman Jewison

Cast

Chaim Topol - Tevye
Norma Crane - Golde
Rosalind Harris - Tzeitel, Tevye's oldest daughter
Michele Marsh - Hodel, Tevye's second daughter
Neva Small - Chava, Tevye's third daughter
Molly Picon - Yente, the matchmaker
Paul Mann - Lazar Wolf
Leonard Frey - Motel Kamzoil
Paul Michael Glaser - Perchik
Raymond Lovelock - Fyedka (An Orthodox Christian)
Elaine Edwards - Shprintze, Tevye's fourth daughter
Candy Bonstein - Bielke, Tevye's fifth daughter

Tutte Lemkow - the fiddler

I fancy myself a movie critic. For two years, I even got paid for it. And yet, I carry with me many a cinematic sin. There are a lot of movies one would think a guy calling himself a movie critic would have seen at least once before. I won't go into what movies that perhaps I should have seen at least once before. But one of those missed titles is the 1971 musical, "Fiddler on the Roof," written by Jerry Bock and directed by Norman Jewison.
Well, it was a missed title. It's not anymore. Hence, this post.
In the midst of my wife and me catching up on a variety of musicals over the last couple of years, "Fiddler on the Roof" is a film I've had my sights set on for a long time. I've been curious about what it was all about. Only now am I getting to it. My wife gifted me a copy for Father's Day, and I was very grateful. Thanks, again, Sweety!
Now that I'm publicly confessing my negligence in movie watching, I admit I had never seen the musical "Oliver!" before either. I finally watched it for the first time a month or two ago. I'm saving that review for another long-term movie post project I'm working on regarding film adaptations of Dickens' "Oliver Twist." That'll come sooner or later.
So, "Fiddler on the Roof" is set in a small Jewish village called Anatevka located somewhere in Imperial Russia in 1905.
The story follows a Jewish milkman, Tevye (Chaim Topol), who lives with his wife, Golde (Norma Crane), and their five daughters. Though poor, Tevye is a devoted family man trying to keep his family

Chaim Topol as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof."

well cared for while ensuring the family's Jewish traditions are preserved. He even sings about tradition!
Those customs and traditions he holds dear, desiring their longevity, have been a long-standing moral guide for the lifestyles not only of his own family but of all the Jewish folks in Anatevka.
However, as his three oldest daughters—Tzeitel, the oldest (Rosalind Harris), Hodel, the second daughter (Michele Marsh), and Chava, the third daughter (Neva Small)—start eyeing suitors who propose marriage yet don't quite hold the same values, morals, or convictions as Tevye, he has to weigh each of their requests for his daughters' hands in marriage against those values and traditions he sang about earlier in the movie.
The local matchmaker, Yente (Molly Picon), pairs the local butcher, Lazar Wolf (Paul Mann), with Tzeitel.
Despite the huge age difference between Lazar and Tzeitel, Tevye agrees to the arrangement. But you know who doesn't agree to this? Tzeitel! He's much too old. And she has her heart set on Motel Kamzoil (Leonard Frey), the local tailor and Tzeitel's childhood friend. And though he doesn't have great wealth, he's devoted to her, which makes him a much more suitable match.
Tzeitel begs her father not to make her marry Lazar, even despite the agreement he made with him.
Of course, he's got to tell Golde about it, and that's a whole big dream sequence with singing and dancing.
Two other suitors narrow in on Tevye's next two eldest daughters. And like any good father, he finds these guys questionable. 
Perchik (Paul Michael Glaser), a Jewish student from the university in Kyiv with strong Bolshevik political views, proposes to Hodel just before he heads back to Kyiv to work for the festering Russian revolution.

Soon after that, a young man named Fyedka (Raymond Lovelock), an Orthodox Christian, falls in love with, and proposes to, Tevye's third oldest, Chava. Of course, being Christian really goes against her father's Jewish grain. With each relationship, Tevye is more reluctant to give his blessing. With Fyedka and Chava, he's really not happy about it. 
All the while, Anatevka faces looming persecution from the Russian Empire, and the townsfolk are threatened with exile from their beloved homes. 

Tevye carries this internal struggle between tradition and change amidst a backdrop of relentless social and political upheaval. This is especially true as his own daughters wish to marry into lives not quite fitting within those Jewish traditions. And with each daughter, that respective lifestyle deviates farther and farther from those traditions.
The emotion from Tevye is keenly felt—both the joys and the anguish—thanks to Topol's memorable performance. I don't toss out the term "memorable" haphazardly. That's the best word to describe his acting in this movie. His fear, happiness, anger, and sadness (dare I call them crosses?) hit the audience pretty hard. I really felt sympathy for Tevye. But above all, he struggles to do what he thinks is pleasing to God despite his personal thoughts and feelings. Many a time in the movie, when being asked to do or give something he initially doesn't want to, he glances towards Heaven, sometimes with a comment, or rather, a question.

In one scene when the local bookseller tells him about expulsions of Jewish people happening elsewhere in Russia, Tevye looks to God and says, "Dear God. Did you have to send me news like that - today of all days? I know, I know we are the chosen people. But once in a while, can't you choose someone else?" There's a welcomed handful of these humorous conversations he has with God. 

Aside from Topol's performance, and of course the well-remembered songs, it was the actual fiddler playing on the roof that made me think. I was curious what he represented and how that representation played into the story.

"A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck," Tevye says to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. "It isn't easy. You may ask 'Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?' Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!"

Sure, I guess that sums it up.

I don't know much, if anything, about Jewish traditions and their adherence to tradition.As an old-school mackerel-snapping Papist myself, also known as a Traditional Roman Catholic, the premise of tradition works for me.
So, the premise of keeping balance while living a Catholic life within a fallen, corrupt world strikes some sensitive chords. The world changes while we live in that world, but we work hard not to be "of" that world. But this is a story of a Jewish village. So, the fiddler seems to be the image of their endurance as the world around them changes and tries to tear into them.
The roof is like earthly life. The fiddler is the richness and beauty of religion, family, and human flourishing all wrapped together. It's all balancing on faith against the winds of change. Stability isn't possible when trying to keep up with the constant changes of the world, which ceaselessly blow in different directions.
There's certainly a hint of "social progress" in the story. There's also a strong melancholic tone underneath the joy and beauty and all that. The premise isn't so much whether customs should change. Rather, Tevye struggles with whether people can remain themselves while the traditions that define them seem to slowly break away little by little. The story doesn't really answer that question, which is why it's such a fantastic movie. Well, there's a lot of other factors that make it fantastic, of course. There's the amazing songs that have seem to last through the decades. Topol's amazing performance, once again. The turmoil. The depictions. The emotion. The storyline. I can't resist keeping it in my stockpile of personal favorite films from now on.