My Review of "The Secret of my Success"

The Secret of my Success is a comedy that came out back in 1987. Back in those days they kind of had a "Fake it until you make it" genre. There were so many types of these movies. This movie puts a little twist to it by making it corporate. The problem with this movie is that they have a lot of weird pacing issues and they tried to pack too much into one movie.

It all starts with a guy named Brantley. He's a kid from Kansas. His family loves him and deeply care for him. It's not quite enough for Brantley though. He has high ambitions to become successful in New York city. It's sort of a country bumpkin trying to go to the big city to make it big. I started to wonder how come we don't have these types of movies anymore?

When Brantley finally makes it to New York he discovers it's not the rosy place that he expected it to be. Nobody is hiring and the streets are littered with crime. He can barely survive with the funds he brought with him. Fortunately for him, his mother had given him a contact to a distant relative who lives in New York.

This distant relative happens to be a big wig of a huge corporate named Howard. Kin is kin and Howard reluctantly agrees to hire Brantley into his mailroom. Brantley quickly learns the layout of the land in this corporation. It's built with hierarchies where low level employees can't really communicate with the executives. They could have pushed this to make it a little more interesting. It could have had a socio economic/high school division thing going on here.

Brantley is ever industrious and ambitious so he decides to study the company the best he can. In doing so he discovers there's an empty office where he can assume the identity of an employee that was recently let go. Everyone in this company seems faceless so he would take advantage of their ignorance.

Pretty soon he starts to discover inefficiencies within the government that nobody really cares about. The company has been going downhill because the higher executives have not really been paying attention to the ground level. They're more interested in slashing costs than building a better and more efficient company. This could have been the whole movie but being a movie of the time they had to have a romantic element to it.

In walks Christy. She's basically the love interest for Brantley. He's utterly obsessed with her and they make many montages to push that point across. These montages and slow takes are quite annoying and ruin the whole pacing of this movie. His relationship with Christy also makes this into two movies jammed into one.

On one end we have the weird convoluted love confusion of Christy, Brantley, Howard and Howard's wife Vera. Then we have the story of Brantley's quest to save the company from downfall. That's a lot to be clumped into a two hour movie.

There are some fun confusion moments where Brantley is about to be discovered for the fake employee but that's closer to the end. The last portion of the movie has a few elements where they just wanted to cleanly end it. There's not a lot of explanation and things conveniently happen. You can tell they were pressed to throw it all together to tie up neatly at the end.

That's not to say there weren't many clever elements to this movie. There are a lot of great ideas but the tone and pace of the movie are all over the place. This is because they wanted to stuff so much into this one movie. They could have broken this up or even made this into a TV series. I think that would have been better.

Overall, this movie had some fun moments but not frequent enough for me to say it was a good time throughout. It does drag on a lot for certain scenes but again this is just some old school techniques. I don't think a person of this time would be able to handle this sort of pacing. I have to give this movie a 5 out of 10. The characters are charming enough but it is not something I would want others to have to endure.