Taglines: They’re rich. They’re in love. They’re negotiating.
Just Tell Me What You Want movie storyline. Max Herschel, the married, wealthy, vulgar, egotistical, middle-aged head of a corporate empire, is satisfied with the somewhat casual love/hate relationship he shares with his mistress and protegee, television producer “Bones” Burton, just as it is, but she wants a more serious commitment.
The young woman attempts to extricate herself from the affair—or perhaps force her lover into taking the next, more permanent step—by dating a younger man, off-off-Broadway playwright Steven Routledge. Max, however, is not a man to accept defeat in any of his endeavors, and he retaliates with a vengeance. The two engage in an escalating battle of wits, with Max discovering money can’t resolve everything when he is outsmarted by business rival Seymour Berger and his grandson Mike. It leads to a comic fight between Max and Bones at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman.
In this Sidney Lumet romantic comedy, the screenplay written by Jay Presson Allen, adapted from her novel. She won the David di Donatello Award for Best Screenplay of a Foreign Film. To date, this is Ali MacGraw’s last leading role in a film.
Film Review for Just Tell Me What You Want
“Just Tell Me What You Want” occupies a world most of us have fantasies about, the world of an incredibly powerful, self-made business tycoon. It’s a world that’s not new in the movies, but not often is it seen as sharply as in this film, which, amazingly, leaves us feeling fairly affectionate about the people involved: This is a film that could have just been high-class, soft-core trash, but it sneaks in a couple of fascinating characters and makes them real.
They are Max Herschel (Alan King), investor, art collector, husband, lover, overgrown baby, and Bones Burton (Ali MacGraw), his mistress, who’s in television production. She’s also his prize creation; they met, we gather, 13 years ago when she was a teenager, and Max has educated her, stage-managed her career, doted on her ever since.
But now there’s a crisis: Max has purchased a near-bankrupt studio, and wants to plunder it for its film library and then sell the real estate to make a sports stadium. But Bones wants to try to turn the studio around.
He can’t quite see his protégé succeeding on her own. But they have other problems, too. Bones, who has just had another abortion and isn’t getting any younger, wants to get married. But Max is still married, and supports his deranged wife (Dina Merrill) in a series of expensive private institutions. He also cheats on both his wife and his mistress.
Bones grows rebellious, falls in love with a young playwright, and marries him one morning. Max, enraged, tries to strip her of everything he’s ever given her. Bones, livid, violently attacks Max with her handbag in Bergdoff Goodman’s, in one of the movie’s funniest scenes. And Max, wounded, goes undercover to try to destroy Bones’s husband.
All of the ins and outs of the plot (and they are many) are essentially just props for the director, Sidney Lumet, who is mostly concerned with the characters of Max and Bones. The movie’s especially successful with Max, who comes across as virile, childish, bright, vindictive and perversely likable.
The performance by King is surprisingly good, considering how little feature film acting experience King has; King really inhabits the role of the rich tyrant, instead of just strutting through the dialogue. MacGraw is good, too, as Bones, making the character sexy primarily because of her intelligence.
The movie has several good supporting performances, especially by Myrna Loy, as an executive secretary who sees right through all of Max’s many moods, and by Keenan Wynn, as an ancient real estate tycoon who is Max’s chief competition. The whole cast, indeed, is plausible as real people, and that’s what makes this movie somewhat unusual.
There’s a whole genre of movies about the sex lives of the rich and famous, and the actors in them usually seem a little smaller than the lives they’re playing. Not this time: “Just Tell Me What You Want” somehow succeeds in taking on a tacky genre, overcoming it, and giving us a couple of actually interesting characters.
Just Tell Me What You Want (1980)
Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Ali MacGraw, Alan King, Peter Weller, Myrna Loy, Dina Merrill, Keenan Wynn, Tony Roberts, Judy Kaye, Sara Truslow, Joseph Maher, John Walter Davis, Annabel Lukins
Screenplay by: Jay Presson Allen
Production Design by: Tony Walton
Cinematography by: Oswald Morris
Film Editing by: Jack Fitzstephens
Costume Design by: Gloria Gresham, Tony Walton
Set Decoration by: Robert Drumheller, Justin Scoppa Jr.
Art Direction by: John Jay Moore
Music by: Charles Strouse
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: January 18, 1980
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