The Secret of My Success

By Mr. Tropnevad

Summary

Kansas farm boy Brantley (Michael J. Fox) moves to New York City with intentions on moving up the corporate ladder. Brantley gets a job in his uncle’s large corporation’s mailroom. Instead of working his way up the old fashion way he discovers an empty executive’s office and changes his name to Carlton Whitfield and begins to impress a high ranking female executive. To make matters worse his oversexed aunt gets mixed up with Brantley and now he finds himself juggling two jobs, two identities and two women.


What I Expected

Since it is Valentine’s Day I searched through Netflix’s instant movie list under romantic movies and I found very little. I saw this in the list and I remembered seeing this as a kid and liking it. I figured why not watch it again and see what I think of it now as an adult.

The Bad

In the beginning of the movie we get to see flashbacks of Brantley on his farm with his parents. This happens about three times and I could have dealt without seeing it even once. I found it annoying because they could have informed us about his parents in another way…oh wait they did.

The movie is about two hours long and it could have been shorter. They should have taken out the flashbacks of Brantley on the farm and the intro of him arriving in New York City. They didn’t have to show how women dressed back then for five minutes because the clothing was ridiculous looking then and it is atrocious looking now. I will say on a positive note I did find the scene with him on the pay phone humorous when he is speaking to his parents while a shoot out was taking place near him.

There is a scene where Vera Prescott (Margaret Whitton) is trying to seduce Brantley in a limo while he is driving her to her home. She does several things to seduce him while she is in the back seat but there is one part where I just thought it was stupid. This may be a pet peeve of mine, but I don’t find a woman smoking sexy at all and when they take a close up on her cigarette being lit, I was just like, whatever. To make it worse, she blows smoke into the front seat and he begins to cough. While they may have been going for a laugh here I think they went overboard.

The Good

It has the famous Oh Yeah song by Yello from the 80’s in it. This song can be heard in several 80s movies and for some reason I always liked it. Not that I could sit down and listen to this song nonstop, but I still liked it when it was played in movies. If you don’t remember the song then click on the video.

I thought Margaret Whitton did a good job at being the cougar after her prey. She is an undersexed wife who is in need of attention and when Brantley gives it to her she goes nuts and wants more. She seems to be so under appreciated by her husband that she proceeds to rape Brantley. Every time she goes after him it made me think if that is what it is like for a woman to rape a man.

The writers did a good job at showing how Brantley goes from a mailroom guy to an executive in a company. This would never work today, but I could see it working in the 80s. He does everything possible to manipulate everyone into thinking he is an executive and as a mailroom guy he does everything he can to get his executive side moving along. He is able to get office supplies, name plates, business cards, and all the repots needed for human resources.

Richard Jordan does a good job at being Brantley’s uncle Howard Prescott. He is the head of his company and doesn’t want anything to do with his wife Vera. He makes you believe that he is a hard business man who is after money and that is it, until we find out that he is having a relationship with someone in the office. He has a beautiful wife and doesn’t want anything to do with her. Essentially he is just with her, because he doesn’t want to lose his company in a divorce.

Michael J. Fox does the same thing that he does in every movie, but in this one he adds a little bit more charisma to himself. He still acts like he did in Back to the Future, but now he is more romantic and since this is a romantic comedy we get to see a different side of him. He pulls it off and then some. He does a great job at handling two relationships without anyone catching on. I really don’t consider his aunt a relationship, but more like a series of rape scenes, because he doesn't want to get caught by his uncle, but he does enjoy it. He is able to do the double personality very well and when he is almost caught he has to bounce back and forth or run like crazy to another area of the building to escape his bosses such as his uncle, the mail room boss, or another executive. He is constantly changing clothes in between jobs and somehow barley escapes being caught.

I am not going to post any spoilers but I will just give a mention to a few scenes that you need to be on the lookout for. There are several scenes that really stuck with me and I remember all of them very fondly. Every time you think Brantley is about to get caught he manages to escape and these scenes are humorous. There is a scene where he is in his apartment and his neighbors are having sex and I found it funny, because while we have seen this in movies before, Fox puts a new spin on it to make it interesting for his character. The final scene where everything comes together in the country house is humorous. While I have seen this done before it works perfect for the movie and when we get to the ending you will be pleasantly surprised. Naturally you will see it coming, but at least it ends on a good note.

Overall Thoughts

Watching this as an adult I found it more enjoyable than as a child. While not everyone could relate to Michael J. Fox in this I found that I could. Will everyone like this movie, probably not because some people dislike Michael J. Fox and find most of what he does is corny. The goal for this was just to inform everyone that instant Netflix did have a romantic movie on their site that could be enjoyable. I searched and Zentilack did a search and we found nothing, but soft core porn and movies that were really bad. I wasn’t about to watch a romantic movie that was depressing or a bad movie to post on Valentines Day. While most people will not be watching this at least you know it is available and can watch it another day. Since it is streaming on Netflix I will say stream it. I will mention that Amazon has two movie packs that you can buy that include this movie and one is a four pack and the other is a five pack. I don’t recommend buying either because most of the movies can be streamed on instant Netflix. If Netflix does take this down then I recommend buying the Michael J. Fox Comedy Favorites Collection on Amazon for $5 or wait for it come to blu-ray.

Overall – Stream via Netflix