How to Beat the High Cost of Living
1980. Directed by Robert Scheerer.
Mr. Scheerer directed a lot of television before and after this picture. It shows.
THE SHOT: Susan St. James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange play are suburban housewives who, financially pressed by the malaise of the Carter presidency, plot to steal a MILLION dollars from a shopping mall during a promotional stunt.
TONE: Kind of all over the place. Never strays far from 70s TV movie comedy. Animated titles borrow heavily from Peanuts specials, if that gives you any idea. Senior citizens dress like hippies, adorable moppets swear like sailors, married couples trade gibes as though scripted by Neil Simon.
Susan St. James plays perky, Jane Curtin plays repressed, Jessica Lange plays flighty.
Lange, after King Kong but before Tootsie, has yet to find her voice as an actress. She’s all over the place in this, flighty and stupid in one scene, then angry and imperious in the next, then fluttery and tragic in the one after that, none of them convincing.
There are feeble attempts to deal with feminists issues, but they conflict with the scripts need to have the women be ditzy. Similarly, there are stabs at topical humor, including attacks on Carter, Reagan, the Germans, Japanese and Arabs.
Fred Willard has, for some reason, been asked to play dour and unfunny. Dabney Coleman has been asked to play sincere and heartfelt. Richard Benjamin plays his scenes as though in a completely different movie. Might have been a better one, but still.
Garrett Morris has been given a genuine “surprise cameo” appearance, complete with “turn toward the camera” introduction, as if we the audience is expected to gasp and break out into applause when Garrett Morris suddenly appears on screen.
In a moment that defines “gratuitous nudity,” Jane Curtin performs a striptease and we go in for an utterly unnecessary closeup of some other woman’s breasts.
DOES CRIME PAY? Yes, although, as is traditional in these types of films (SPOILER ALERT), at least half the money must be blown into the air to be shared by the townspeople.
Garrett Morris has been given a genuine “surprise cameo” appearance, complete with “turn toward the camera” introduction, as if we the audience is expected to gasp and break out into applause when Garrett Morris suddenly appears on screen.
You never now. When I saw “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1986 someone in the audience cheered and applauded when Jim Belushi appeared halfway through. An act of behavior so cognitively dissonant that I still remember it 20 years later.