BIG BUSINESS
With Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Fred Ward, Edward Herrmann, Michele Placido, Daniel Gerroll, and Barry Primus.
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O’Ross, Larry Fishburne, and Gina Gershon.
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City Sadie wants to sell Jupiter Hollow’s main business–the Hollowmade Furniture Company, left to her and her sister by their father–to an Italian businessman (Michele Placido) who wants to level it for strip-mining and condos. Rural Rose, Hollowmade’s feisty foreman, flies to New York with her sister to protest and block this move. Each pair gets booked into a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where the Italian, two troubleshooters for Sadie Shelton (Edward Herrmann and Daniel Gerroll), and eventually Rose Ratliff’s fiance (Fred Ward), a miniature-golf pro, are also staying. The ensuing confusion depends on mistaken identities, trick photography, and elevator doors opening and closing at precisely the right time, climaxing when the four women converge in a ladies’ room.
The grasp of period is equally sloppy and indifferent. Behind the credits sequence–the events leading up to the births in Jupiter Hollow–we hear Benny Goodman playing his famous rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” apparently placing these events around 1938; but the version of Goodman’s number that we’re hearing is a “re-creation” done at least a couple of decades later, making the time as ersatz and as undifferentiated as the place.
While it might seem farfetched to link Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Danko, the androgynous attributes of both characters as Soviet figureheads seem to support the parallel. Danko’s first appearance, in the film’s opening scene, is in a curious coed bathhouse in Moscow populated by nude female bathers and weight-lifting males wreathed in clouds of steam; Danko shows no voyeuristic interest in this spectacle–for how can a spectacle be interested in a spectacle? (Much later, in a Chicago hotel room, Danko’s erotic disinterest is confirmed by his one-word comment on the porn that’s visible on his TV set, “Capitalism”; still later, a dialogue with Ridzik establishes that he has neither a wife nor a girlfriend.) We next see him efficiently carrying out a drug bust in a cafe, where he’s accused by a Georgian drug dealer of being compliant with the persecution of Georgians. Then, in the matching Chicago drug-bust sequence, the relevant minority group is blacks, and Ridzik’s relative laxness as a police detective is underlined by his distracted interest in some street hookers.
This coincides at certain points with my earlier assertion that Schwarzenegger, like Esther Williams, is director-proof and auteur-proof, although it’s worth pointing out that The Ten Commandments and Touch of Evil both stand as ample evidence that Heston is not. In the case of Red Heat, director and cowriter Walter Hill, who initiated this project and certainly has auteurist credentials, couldn’t put much of his stamp on the proceedings, and it’s questionable whether anyone engaged to write and/or direct a future Schwarzenegger project would be able to do much better. In the final analysis, the main artistic decisions of movies like Big Business and Red Heat are basically made by bankers, not filmmakers, and the elaborate doublings of both movies count for little more than alternate ways of adding up figures: two Midlers (one urban plus, one rural minus) and two Tomlins (one rural plus, one urban minus) add up to zero; and Soviet Schwarzenegger plus American money and Belushi equals American Schwarzenegger–an axiom.
