Tin Men

Levinson's Tin Men are aluminium siding salesmen not averse to posing as Life magazine photographers to get the foot in the door to offload their wares on the unwary householder. Among themselves, their vision is Jonsonian, and their respect is reserved for the fittest alone. A feud develops between two of them, BB (Dreyfuss) and Tilley (De Vito), over a bumped Cadillac fender, and escalates beyond knock-for-knock reprisals to the cruel seduction of Tilley's wife (Hershey) by BB as revenge. But BB finds himself hoist by his own petard when he falls in love, a depleting experience which has not previously figured in his game plan. Happily, the film does not turn squashy, and allows its salesmen to preserve their duplicity. It's a confident return to form and to Baltimore for the Diner man. A terrific cast grabs the naturalistic speech patterns, and Hershey manages movingly to register her reality as the sole bearer of human values.