INT. GALLERY ROOM — SCI-FI · TOMORROW'S FRAME — DAY
Robert Scheerer's 1980 heist comedy arrives at a peculiar intersection of economic anxiety and feminist awakening, a film that transforms the quotidian despair of suburban divorcees into the raw material for caper cinema. The premise—three women, buckling under the weight of inflation and insufficient alimony, conspire to steal a million dollars in cash from a giant plastic sphere displayed in a local mall—reads as a Mad magazine parody of the heist genre, and the film leans into this absurdity with a knowing wink. Yet beneath the broad comedy and the polyester sheen of its period trappings lies a surprisingly acerbic critique of the economic structures that rendered middle-class American women uniquely vulnerable in the stagflation era. The shopping center, that temple of consumer desire, becomes the site of a reckoning: the women who have been told their entire lives that fulfillment lies in acquisition decide to short-circuit the system entirely, taking the money directly rather than continue the exhausting pantomime of earning and spending.
The ensemble, anchored by Jane Curtin, Susan Saint James, and Jessica Lange, operates with a chemistry that suggests genuine camaraderie rather than the manufactured bonhomie of lesser comedies. Curtin, fresh from her tenure on "Saturday Night Live," brings a deadpan precision to her portrayal of a woman whose competence has been systematically undervalued by a society that measures female worth in marital status. Saint James, deploying the arch sophistication she honed on "McMillan & Wife," plays the reluctant mastermind with a blend of exasperation and ingenuity that grounds the film's more outlandish plot mechanics in recognizable human behavior. The film's most radical gesture, perhaps, is its refusal to moralize about its protagonists' criminality. These are not women driven to desperation by villainous circumstances so much as women who have simply done the arithmetic and found the legitimate economy an unwinnable game.
CUT TO: THE WORK UNFOLDS
The heist itself, involving a ludicrously oversized clear plastic sphere filled with currency—a promotional gimmick that seems almost quaint in our era of digital abstraction—is staged with a slapstick energy that recalls the tradition of Ealing comedies filtered through the sensibility of late-seventies American farce. The film understands that the mechanics of a heist are inherently cinematic, that the pleasure of watching a plan unfold is one of the medium's primal satisfactions. The escalating complications—security guards, romantic entanglements, the ever-present threat of exposure—generate genuine tension even as the film maintains its comic register. Scheerer's direction, workmanlike rather than inspired, nonetheless demonstrates a solid grasp of pacing and an appreciation for the comedic potential of physical space, the mall's architecture of consumption becoming a playground of transgression.
What distinguishes "How to Beat the High Cost of Living" from the disposable comedies of its era is its engagement with the material realities of women's lives in the early 1980s. The film takes seriously, even within its comic framework, the economic precarity of divorce, the indignities of alimony negotiation, the quiet desperation of women who played by the rules and found themselves abandoned by the system those rules were designed to serve. The film's feminist subtext is never didactic; it is embedded in the premise itself, in the radical proposition that three suburban housewives might be more competent criminals than the men who underestimate them. The movie has aged into something more interesting than its original reception would have predicted—a time capsule of a specific economic and cultural moment, and a reminder that comedy has always been one of the most effective vehicles for social critique. For those willing to look past the period aesthetics, it offers a sly, subversive, and unexpectedly resonant exploration of what happens when the American Dream reveals itself as a pyramid scheme and the women at the bottom decide to stop playing along.
Source Reference
Original archive log: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/119617?language=en-US