The Secret of My Success (1987)

(In French, On TV, July 2019) In between Wall Street, Working Girl, Baby Boom and The Secret of My Success, 1987 (ish) was quite a year for Hollywood taking on the Manhattan corporate career path. This time around, we get Michael J. Fox as a corn-fed Kansas graduate heading to the Big Apple with the conviction of impending success and big bucks. Things soon take a turn for the worse, and he gets to barely eke a living out of a mailroom job. But you can’t keep an ambitious lad down, and before long he’s reading inter-office mail not addressed to him, taking over an empty office and making executive choices for his new company. Of course, I’m skipping over the whole sleeping-with-the-president’s-wife (who happens to be his step-aunt—it’s that kind of movie) thing. Or should I? Because one of The Secret of My Success’s most repellent aspects is how it makes a big deal of accusing its female lead of sleeping around while cheering the male protagonist’s escapades with lengthy sustained replays of Yello’s “Oh Yeah.” This being a comedy, hard work and perseverance take a back seat to Fox’s admittedly considerable boyish charm as he romances the ladies and schmoozes the bankers required for his ultimate success. Caricatures of corrupt business executives end up making the film feel like it’s aimed at kids despite the considerable sexual material. The result isn’t just hard to appreciate as a coherent whole as it zooms between get-rich glibness, sex farce and half-hearted romance: it’s a bit of a repellent mess when taken in as a whole (the protagonist’s lack of ambition beyond being rich also reflects poorly on its 1987 pre-crash nature). Of course, I’m now old enough to think that Helen Slater (then 24) isn’t nearly as attractive as Margaret Whitton (then 38), but I suspect that much of this has to do with each character’s hairstyle. Anyway: the point being that The Secret of My Success is the kind of film that is badly steeped into its time and not really in a charming way—more in a vaguely horrifying fashion that lays stark the moral degeneracy of the time as it blithely does not question its worst aspects. That’s quite a bit to lay down at the feet of what’s supposed to be a quirky breezy comedy but if thirty years’ worth of hindsight show, it’s that The Secret of My Success is far more corrupt than it realized at the time.