MOVIES REVIEWS : A LEAP BACK IN TIME AND PLACE FOR A COMEDY AND A THRILLER : ‘Tin Men’

What are “Tin Men,” for sweet heaven’s sake? Guys running around without their hearts? Almost. But this isn’t Oz, it’s Baltimore in the fall of 1963, and what these smooth-talking, scamming “tin men” lack isn’t heart, it’s scruples. How else could they peddle freight-loads of aluminum siding at vastly inflated prices to a deeply uninterested public?

What emerges is, against all odds, the year’s most pungently offbeat comedy and the most improbable love story since King Kong sighted Fay Wray. (It opens today at selected theaters.)

In this saga, boy doesn’t meet girl; one tin man’s Cadillac meets another’s sparkling new one--with a crunch that can be heard all the way out to Pimlico. In the escalating vendetta that follows, no sneak attack or dirty trick is low enough.

Finally Bill (BB) Babowsky (Richard Dreyfuss) vows to find the weakness of the weaseling idiot who hit him, the blustering, ineffective Ernest Tilley (Danny DeVito), and exploit it. Enter Nora (Barbara Hershey), Tilley’s disgruntled wife and certainly his most precarious asset.

Heartlessly--and effortlessly--Babowsky scores. He seduces an unsuspecting Nora in the time it takes to play a stack of Sinatra love songs on an old Emerson automatic. But BB’s revenge isn’t yet complete--gleefully, he leaves the sleeping wife to call her husband and gloat. Then comes Tilley’s counter-salvo: with maniacal glee he decorates their front lawn with Nora’s every possession. He’s relieved to be rid of her.

This--a love story? These polyester princes--our heroes? Well, anti-heroes? Indeed. In the same, supremely assured way that writer-director Barry Levinson inventoried the high school graduates of “Diner,” he works the same turf, adult side, in “Tin Men.” (His salesmen even meet at the Hilltop Diner, with one character, Bagel, played again by Michael Tucker, a link from the earlier movie.) And in the ensuing years, Levinson’s already lethal ear has gotten even more acute. (Just one anachronism sticks out: “Watch my lips” wasn’t the catch-phrase in 1963 that it is now.)

These men are a generation older than “Diner’s” late teen-agers; their humor is deadpan, sly; they give nothing away. Tilley’s partner, Sam (played with magnificent sang-froid by Jackie Gayle) broods frequently on the sex life of the “Bonanza” boys. BB’s blond, pompadoured office buddy, Cheese (Seymour Cassell, Cassavetes’ great character man), is a straight-faced witness to his every automotive disaster. And John Mahoney’s Moe is the incarnation of the greatest “closer” in the business.

The tin men are never alone; they travel in packs or in pairs, as if they were dissolute nuns. The outside world is as alien to them as the non-circus world is to a carny operator--and its population is all “marks,” ripe for the “Life magazine” scam, the “This job is free!” ploy. They are first cousins to the rollickingly blasphemous real estate salesmen of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” although somehow, Levinson, without losing the poetry, has laundered it--just a scintilla. (The film’s “R” rating is, indeed, for its innovative invective.)

The only shadow on their commission-heavy horizon is Maryland’s brand-new Home Improvement Commission, whose investigations into unscrupulous selling practices are cutting a lot of tin men off at the knees--or at their state licenses. (Part of Levinson’s drollery is that the commission’s meetings take place in a makeshift committee room, bustling with sheet-rock workers during its hearings. Now, if this building only had lasting aluminum siding. . . .)

To spin tall tales of the tin men shouldn’t be hard. It’s mesmerizing material, and for Levinson, whose father worked for a while like Wing, DeVito’s cold-eyed blond boss, it’s a snap. To make this vanishing breed as crass yet as touching as they are takes far more delicacy, and for Levinson and his impeccable ensemble (including a mercifully toned-down DeVito) that seems to have been a snap too.

But to shape a love story from these lousy, unprincipled beginnings takes real artistry. And for this, Levinson had a brilliant pairing: Dreyfuss, marvelously affecting as the womanizer on the brink of his first love, and Hershey, who can break your heart with her own, aghast tears, then melt it with that gurgling, intimate laugh of hers.

“Tin Men’s” physical details are impeccable, from Peter Sova’s finely lit camerawork to the film’s luscious opening credits (by Saxon/Ross Film Design) as a landscape with the pearly, pinky glow of dawn turns out to be the surface of a ’63 Cadillac. The witty and evocative costuming is by Gloria Gresham and the score, a melange of the old and well-loved and the new, ranges from Richie Valens to the Fine Young Cannibals.

With “Radio Days,” they form the year’s most insightful and human American comedies.

‘TIN MEN’ A Touchstone Pictures presentation in association with Silver Screen Partners II of a Barry Levinson film. Producer Mark Johnson. Writer, director Levinson. Camera Peter Sova. Production designer Peter Jamison. Editor Stu Linder. Music Fine Young Cannibals. Associate producer Kim Kurumada. Costumes Gloria Gresham. Set decorator Philip Abramson. Sound Jeff Wexler, Don Coufal, James Steube. With Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, Barbara Hershey, John Mahoney, Jackie Gayle, Stanley Brock, Seymour Cassel, Bruno Kirby, J.T. Walsh, Richard Portnow, Matt Craven, Alan Blumenfeld, Brad Sullivan, Michael Tucker.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian)

Running time: 1 hr., 52 min.