The American Success Company

Scripted by Richert (of Winter Kills fame) from a story by Larry Cohen, this black comedy is a delightfully offbeat satire both on capitalism and on macho posing. Bridges is excellent as the wimpy rich boy, disillusioned with wife and family business, who determines to change his life by taking on a completely new second identity as a cold, callous, misogynistic, semi-criminal type. Loosely structured and often verging on the farcical, it misses as often as it hits, but the performances are superb, and Richert manages to keep the excesses of the script nicely under control. Disarmingly unAmerican in tone and message, it was perhaps not surprisingly shot abroad in Germany.