The Secret of My Success

Brantley Foster arrives in New York from Kansas, cannot find the job he wanted and ends up in the mailroom of a company run by a relative. Then he notices an empty office and invents an executive identity for himself. By day he delivers the post, then changes his clothes and walks into meetings in the same building as a manager. Herbert Ross directed. Michael J. Fox plays Brantley. It opened at number one on 10 April 1987 with 7.8 million dollars and stayed on top for five weeks. It reached 111 million dollars worldwide, 66.995 million of that domestically, and was the seventh highest-grossing film of 1987, ahead of RoboCop and Predator. The reviews said the opposite. Roger Ebert found the screenplay trapped in some kind of time warp, as though written in the 1950s; Gene Siskel called it staggeringly bad. Vincent Canby in the New York Times found it close to inspired in places. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 49 percent, with a B plus from audiences. David Foster wrote the score and produced seven of the ten soundtrack tracks. The title song performed by Night Ranger was nominated for the Best Original Song Golden Globe and lost to the song from Dirty Dancing. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties career comedy and Michael J. Fox. Who it is not for: anyone who picks at the logic. The impersonation could not survive a single day, and the film does not care.