The Associate

Passed over for promotion, financial consultant Laurel Ayers (Goldberg) strikes out on her own. Prospective clients turn her down; they're impressed to a man, they say, but their partners will never support them. Thus Laurel forges Mr Robert S Cutty, a white man whose acumen, elusiveness and impressively masculine personal effects enchant Wall Street and kick start Ayers Cutty's business ventures. Then Bob Cutty gets out of hand. He takes all the praise, attracts media attention and even turns out to be an absent father. A righteous populist comedy, with some dark tinges to the element of fairy story; but also a standard Whoopi-cushion - a plot for kids, puerile characterisation, and sentimentality hammered home by the score. The present film is a remake of L'Associé, directed by René Gainville in 1979, which in turn was a remake of a British film, The Mysterious Mr Davis, directed by Claude Autant-Lara in 1936, all of them deriving from a source novel, El Socio, by the Chilean author Jenaro Prieto.