Just Tell Me What You Want (1980)

Allen King is one of the richest and most powerful men in the USA, with a finger in everything -- real estate, television, movies, art collections, tax-deductible charities -- and he can have any woman he wants. It isn't just that he CAN have them; he HAS them.He has Ali MacGraw on his staff, as a producer of a TV talk show, and she's been his main squeeze for some time now. He has her set up in her own lavish apartment and she wears more jewels than Cleopatra.Two problems. First, he's too busy to really pay much attention to her. He's always on the phone, threatening people, sometimes for millions of dollars, sometimes for pennies. He calls Hollywood. He calls Switzerland and makes a demand on a Swiss bank that they must observe, otherwise he's going to withdraw his funds -- "Fermez les JAMBS" -- and put the bank out of business.The second problem, not counting King's mentally ill wife who is conveniently stashed away in an upscale "loony bin" in Minnesota, is that Ali MacGraw is a little tired of playing a fiddle in the orchestra and wants to be her own concert master for a change. On top of that she falls in love with a playwright, Peter Weller, and marries him.This distresses Alan King but he's not the kind of guy who's willing to show that he's been beaten. When she gives him the bad news in his office, he tries to talk MacGraw out of the marriage. "We can have it annulled," he says with a smile. But, no. Weller and MacGraw are in love and she'll stick with her decision. She leaves the office when King tells her, okay, whatever she wants, and says that he must now make some important calls. Bye-bye and, really, the best of luck. This leads to the funniest scene in this good-natured comedy.When MacGraw is gone, King's smile fades. The office is utterly silent and King deliberately replaces the phone. He walks to his desk, carefully extracts his contact lenses and put them away in their case. Then he sits down, put his face in his hands, and cries out in an excess of agony, "I'm a DEAD JEW!" He sobs loudly and all his secretaries run in, thinking he's had a stroke or something.He finally recovers and begins snapping out orders that will knee-cap MacGraw and her playwright husband -- canceling her credit cards, doing something nasty with her fancy apartment, reclaiming all his furniture and the millions of dollars of paintings on the wall. "What about my douche bag?", MacGraw demands of the security guards. "Personal effects, okay, but not the furniture or paintings." It leads to the second funniest scene in the movie, in which MacGraw accidentally runs into King in Bergdorff-Goodman's and begins to beat the hell out of him with her purse and her shoes, demolishing half the shop in the process. He manages to shove her away and dashes out the door. And, just when you think the fight is over, you find it isn't. She rushes outside, catches him holding on to his limousine -- "Open the Goddam DOOR!" -- and continues belaboring him, kicking, punching, and pounding while he lies screaming for help on the pavement. When he finally escapes the crowd applauds.In between these very funny moments, it's not so funny. There are moments of tragedy. King's batty wife dies and though he gets over it quickly it's clear that he's been hurt. King's not a bad guy. He's a materialist of course, the kind of man to whom "success" and "money" mean the same thing. But he's sentimental, too, and not uncaring. Most of the humor comes from King's character, authoritarian, demanding, wheedling, sharp as a tack -- as when he's courting a new secretary in a fancy restaurant and describing how he'll send her back to college and get her teeth capped. In the hospital after fainting, he's terrified. Against the advice of his doctors he whispers a demand for a pacemaker, and he gives them the name of a manufacturer of the most expensive devices, as if he were ordering a new Mercedes. He's keenly perceptive too. About Hollywood, he tells MacGraw, "Girls don't get laid after they're twenty-one. Middle age starts at twenty-four." We don't ordinarily think of the director, Sidney Lumet, as a professional who is given whole-heartedly to comedy, and this story has some sharp edges to it. It's confusing too, unless you understand the movie business and some other shenanigans that King is involved in. It's sufficiently confusing that at the end, with King in a hospital bed and the already-married MacGraw demanding that King admits he loves her, I wasn't at all sure which man she wound up with.

I have seen this movie several times, and the interplay between Alan King and Ali McGraw never fails to make me smile. There is no confusion as to which genre this movie was meant to be or in how it turned out. It's clearly a romantic comedy, and a funny one. Some younger viewers may have a hard time understanding the humor, because none of it involves body fluids, toilet humor, eating disgusting things or other gross-outs. We know that love and war are sometimes the same thing. This time, it's business, too!King shines as a hard-nosed business tycoon who is romantically involved with his executive assistant, Bones (McGraw). He likes the informal arrangement just fine, but Bones is to the point where she either wants marriage or to move on. When she seems to fall for a young writer and moves in with him, it's not clear if she is truly in love with him, or if she is using him as leverage to make King jealous enough to propose. King, of course, retaliates. The war between the two, using under-handed business tactics is very funny, with each trying to top the other. The winner can either move on in triumph or dictate the terms of their reconciliation. King is probably best known for his stand-up comedy, but this movie shows him to be a fine comedic actor as well.

King is a really great comedian, virtually unknown to audiences in Europe. In this „late screwball" comedy he plays a tycoon, and for this kind of movie part he sets a mark nobody has surpassed. He brings the right mix of competence and freakishness to the role. He is a ladies man, a hypochondriac (goes well together), is cunning and can be utterly ruthless and cruel. Of course, the character has a great egotistical mind - and yet he is oddly likable. There's more: The movie also includes great performances by Keenan Wynn as competing tycoon and also by Myrna Loy, famous screen beauty of the Golden Age of Hollywood. She plays King's loyal secretary and surrogate mom. Ali McGraw is kind of beautiful but seems to be made of granite (the set design of her ritzy apartment is beautiful and interesting, though), Peter Weller's talents are wasted here.This movie really boasts many, many memorable lines. The character played by Wynn tries to convince the tycoon that he should donate for a wing for special diseases of a hospital. This makes King quip „I can't wait to see those poor guys die of special diseases in my wing!" Also great are the final sequences in which the main character stays in hospital because of an imaginary heart attack. His little, stumpy body lies in a white shroud on an examining bed while he berates the high priced specialists standing around him, telling them in a choked voice that he knows exactly what's wrong with him and they should better read the „f***ing literature"! People are like that! Life is like that! It's great to be able to laugh about it sometimes.

Alan King's world falls apart when long time mistress Ali Macgrue breaks up with him and marries much younger Peter Weller. Snobby comedy isn't for all taste, but is expertly performed and is very, very funny, especially the scene in the department store. Alan King is displayed at his absolute as is Loy in a quite performance. Terrific entertainment. 9 out 10.