(1987) As he's backing out of the car lot in a new Cadillac, Bill "BB" Babowsky (Richard Dreyfuss) gets plowed into by another Cadillac driven by Ernest Tilley (Danny DeVito), distracted with domestic concerns. The two mad men get into an altercation of insults and innuendo, each determined to get revenge. "I'm gonna get even," because he didn't apologize, BB says, "just for the fun of it."

In a restaurant Ernest, still carrying on about the accident, is informed by Sam (Jackie Gayle) and Gil (Stanley Brock), two other aluminum-siding salesmen with Mason-Dixon, that BB's also a tin man with the Gibraltar Aluminum Siding Company. Previously a top seller, Tilley's in a slump. What's more the Home Improvement Commission is investigating deceptive sales practices, and the IRS is after him for back taxes.

Meanwhile, BB ("There's nothing he can't sell") and his partner Moe Adams (John Mahoney), who slickly practice all the tricks of their trade to sell their product, share with Stanley, a new man to the business, some of their confidence games.

After tit-for-tat damage to each other's vehicles - BB kicks in headlights of Tilley's Caddy followed by Tilley's smashing all of BB's car's windows with a crowbar - BB goes after Tilley's wife Nora (Barbara Hershey), with Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis crooning in the background, who's no longer happy in her marriage, having come to the conclusion that "safe and practical" haven't gotten her very far.

After BB calls his antagonist to inform him that he's been cuckolded, Tilley replies that Babowsky can have her - "I thought I got him," BB admits to himself: "He got me!" - and then, hurling everything Nora owns out the windows, shouts: "I'm a free man!"

In my favorite and the funniest of director/writer Barry Levinson's quartet of films set in Baltimore during the 1960s, Tilley proposes to BB (whom he refers to as Mr Merengue) shooting a game of pool for Nora.

The dialogue is diabolically delicious. In conversations with Tilley, Sam complains that Bonanza isn't a realistic TV western (nobody gets horny) but that the sight of vegetables in a smorgasbord proves the existence of God "out of the ground."

However, when Tilley informs Nora that she's living with the crazy guy who smashed up the car and stole her just for spite, she turns on BB, who confesses in the rain to his "training in deceit … occupational hazard."

While the language is raw and masculine (for which the film received an R rating), as would be expected, in at least one respect the portrayal of 1963 has been falsified - nearly every scene has been airbrushed of anyone smoking cigarettes.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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