A Shock to the System (1990 film)
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''A Shock to the System'' is a 1990 American
black comedy Black comedy, also known as dark comedy, morbid humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discus ...
film directed by Jan Egleson and starring
Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 160 films in a career spanning seven decades, and is considered a British film ico ...
,
Swoosie Kurtz Swoosie Kurtz ( ; born September 6, 1944) is an American actress. She is the recipient of an Emmy Award and two Tony Awards. Kurtz made her Broadway theatre, Broadway debut in the 1975 revival of ''Ah, Wilderness''. She has received five Tony ...
,
Elizabeth McGovern Elizabeth Lee McGovern (born July 18, 1961) is an American actress and musician. She has received many awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, three Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Academy Award nomination. Born in Evanston, Ill ...
, and
Peter Riegert Peter Riegert (born April 11, 1947) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Donald "Boon" Schoenstein in ''Animal House'' (1978), oil company executive "Mac" MacIntyre in '' Local Hero'' (1983), pickle store owner Sam Posner in '' ...
. It is based on the 1984
novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...
''A Shock to the System'' by British author
Simon Brett Simon Anthony Lee Brett OBE FRSL (born 28 October 1945 in Worcester Park, Surrey, England) is a British author of detective fiction, a playwright, and a producer-writer for television and radio. As an author, he is best known for his mystery s ...
. The film was released on March 23, 1990 and received generally positive reviews from critics.


Plot

Graham Marshall, a long-time
executive Executive ( exe., exec., execu.) may refer to: Role or title * Executive, a senior management role in an organization ** Chief executive officer (CEO), one of the highest-ranking corporate officers (executives) or administrators ** Executive dir ...
in a large
advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
company, is unexpectedly passed over for
promotion Promotion may refer to: Marketing * Promotion (marketing), one of the four marketing mix elements, comprising any type of marketing communication used to inform or persuade target audiences of the relative merits of a product, service, brand or i ...
in favor of his obnoxious younger rival Bob Benham. While he sympathizes with his friend George Brewster, whose dismissal in the midst of a corporate takeover created the open position, Marshall is angry and disappointed. His greedy, self-absorbed wife Leslie is devastated and continually reproaches her husband for his apparent lack of ambition and willpower. The night of the missed promotion, Graham is waiting for his train on the subway. An aggressive panhandler harasses him for being so rich and ungenerous. In a fit of rage, Graham pushes him hard enough that he falls on the subway tracks and gets run over by an oncoming train. Marshall is able to leave unobserved, which unexpectedly elates him. Deciding to take
revenge Revenge is committing a harmful action against a person or group in response to a grievance, be it real or perceived. Francis Bacon described revenge as a kind of "wild justice" that "does... offend the law ndputteth the law out of office." Pr ...
on the people who have made his life miserable, Marshall starts meticulously planning their deaths. Recalling an incident in which he was almost fatally electrocuted by faulty wiring in his basement, he arranges for Leslie to have a similar accident. After her death, he gets more ambitious and plans to get rid of Bob. First he rents a car using George's corporate account and procures a bottle of heavy downers from an office courier who deals drugs. While on a date with Stella Henderson, a female employee who is romantically interested in him, he spikes her drink with some of the downers and waits until she passes out. Driving the rental car to Bob's boat, he booby-traps it by tampering with a natural gas tank and taping some matches to the door. While returning home, he victoriously lights a cigar and absent-mindedly leaves his personalized gold plated lighter on the dashboard before returning the car to the dealer and going home. The next morning Stella wakes up as expected and assumes she blacked out after having slept with Graham. They spend the morning having sex to further cement Graham's alibi. Bob and one of his brown-nosing subordinates board his boat; opening the door, they ignite the gas tank and blow themselves up. In the wake of Bob's death his boss, Mr. Jones, reaches out to Graham and offers him the promotion. He accepts it and, while discussing Bob's death, Jones casually mentions his interest in flying planes. As Graham settles into his new position, life becomes increasingly hectic. Police Lieutenant Laker, assigned to all the deaths surrounding Graham, is quickly convinced of his guilt but lacks any evidence. Graham realizes his lighter has gone missing and slowly realizes that he must have left it in the rental car. Interviewed by Laker, Stella begins to suspect that Graham really is a killer. She retrieves the lighter from the car rental company and plans to meet Laker on the same subway platform where Graham earlier killed the panhandler. Graham finds her first and, during a tense confrontation, he appears to contemplate pushing her onto the tracks. However, after expressing her deep disappointment with him, Stella hands over the lighter and leaves without further incident. As Graham exits the subway station, he runs into Lt. Laker and victoriously lights a cigar with his retrieved lighter right in his face. Without evidence, Laker has no choice but to let Graham go. Meanwhile George, intensely depressed about his forced retirement, finds Graham's stash of downers and kills himself by taking the rest of them all at once, not realizing his knowledge of the car rental on his corporate account could have implicated Graham. Graham revels in his newfound prestige and freedom, having eliminated all his enemies and gotten away with it, while ensuring Stella's silence by transferring her to Los Angeles. However, there is one more tiresome detail to deal with: Jones refuses to give up his corner office. As Graham continues to narrate, Jones's plane is seen flying over some tropical islands, before encountering sudden engine trouble. The movie ends with the sound of an explosion and Graham looking satisfied with himself.


Difference from the novel

The movie plot differs somewhat from the novel. In the novel, Graham kills the panhandler by clobbering him to death with a golf cart he got as a gift and throwing his body off a bridge into a river below. Then when he tries to kill his wife, he begins with a failed attempt involving him awkwardly buying some poison from a florist after acting very suspicious and lacing a whiskey bottle that his wife drinks constantly from with it so she will drink it and die. However, it turns the whiskey blue and it smells terrible and he knows there's no way she would ever drink it, so he abandons the idea and stashes the bottle in his shed. Then he kills his wife the same way as the movie and kills his boss the same way as the movie (even though his brown-nosing subordinate survives the explosion with only some scars on his face and then proceeds to brown-nose Graham once he gets the promotion). His missing lighter gets resolved differently by his old boss George getting it since the car was rented in his name. He gives it back to Graham without realizing how damning it could have been to the police and Graham silences him by pushing him in front of a subway train to make sure he never talks to anyone else about it. Both the novel and movie end with Graham getting away with all of his killings. However, the novel then throws a final twist of irony at the end. There's a subplot featuring his mother-in-law, who is certain that Graham killed her daughter and is persistently trying to prove it. After Graham taunts her with the knowledge that he will never be prosecuted for it, he returns home from work one day to find Lt Laker preparing to arrest him. It turns out his mother-in-law found the poison laced whiskey bottle in his shed and she drank it and made a big show in front of his neighbors about how he tricked her into drinking it before dropping dead in front of everybody. That combined with the florist testifying about how awkward he acted when he bought the poison and a scorned Stella falsely testifying about how Graham always complained about how much he hated his mother-in-law, it looks very bad for Graham. After getting away with 4 murders, he is about to be arrested for a murder he did not commit.


Cast

*
Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 160 films in a career spanning seven decades, and is considered a British film ico ...
as Graham Marshall *
Elizabeth McGovern Elizabeth Lee McGovern (born July 18, 1961) is an American actress and musician. She has received many awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award, three Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Academy Award nomination. Born in Evanston, Ill ...
as Stella Henderson *
Peter Riegert Peter Riegert (born April 11, 1947) is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Donald "Boon" Schoenstein in ''Animal House'' (1978), oil company executive "Mac" MacIntyre in '' Local Hero'' (1983), pickle store owner Sam Posner in '' ...
as Bob Benham *
Swoosie Kurtz Swoosie Kurtz ( ; born September 6, 1944) is an American actress. She is the recipient of an Emmy Award and two Tony Awards. Kurtz made her Broadway theatre, Broadway debut in the 1975 revival of ''Ah, Wilderness''. She has received five Tony ...
as Leslie Marshall *
Will Patton William Rankin Patton (born June 14, 1954) is an American actor and audiobook narrator. He starred as Colonel Dan Weaver in the TNT science fiction series '' Falling Skies''. He also appeared in the films ''Remember the Titans'', ''Armageddon'' ...
as Lt. Laker *
John McMartin John Francis McMartin (August 21, 1929 – July 6, 2016) was an American actor of stage, film and television. Life and career McMartin was born in Warsaw, Indiana, on August 21, 1929, and raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota. After graduating fro ...
as George Brewster * Jenny Wright as Melanie O'Conner * Philip Moon as Henry Park *
Barbara Baxley Barbara Angie Rose Baxley (January 1, 1923 – June 7, 1990) was an American actress and singer. Early life Barbara Baxley was born on January 1, 1923, in Porterville, California, the daughter of Emma (née Tyler) and Bert Baxley and sister to H ...
as Lillian *
John Finn John Joseph Finn (born September 30, 1952) is an American character actor known as one of the leads of the television programs ''Cold Case'' and ''EZ Streets''. Finn has also had supporting roles in the films '' The Hunted'' (2003), '' Analyze T ...
as Motorman *
Haviland Morris Haviland Morris (born September 14, 1959) is an American film, television, and Broadway actress, who currently works in real estate. Early life Morris was born in Loch Arbour, New Jersey and spent much of her childhood in Hong Kong and Singapor ...
as Tara Liston''A Shock to the System,'' dir. Jan Egleson, 1990. *
Samuel L. Jackson Samuel Leroy Jackson (born December 21, 1948) is an American actor and producer. One of the most widely recognized actors of his generation, the films in which he has appeared have collectively grossed over $27 billion worldwide, making him ...
as Ulysses


Production

The film was shot in
New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
between May 22 and July 28, 1989, on a $10 million budget. Scenes were shot at Wall Street Plaza and
Grand Central Terminal Grand Central Terminal (GCT; also referred to as Grand Central Station or simply as Grand Central) is a commuter rail terminal located at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Grand Central is the southern terminus ...
. The sailboat scenes were filmed on
Lake Montauk Lake Montauk is a 900-acre (360 ha) artificial embayment in Montauk, New York that is home to the largest commercial and sporting fish fleets in the state of New York. History The lake was originally referred to on maps as Lake Wyandanch and com ...
. According to Corsair Pictures executive Frank Perry, the screenplay originally ended with the character of Graham Marshall being killed off but was rewritten because of Caine's performance. A satisfactory ending to the film was not written until the fifth week of filming. The director Jan Egleson ultimately shot three different endings to the film, with the final version not being selected until editing during post-production.


Reception

On
Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
the film holds an approval rating of 67% based on 30 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Aided by Michael Caine's finely layered performance, ''A Shock to the System'' finds dark comedy in the cutthroat modern business world." On
Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, the film has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, writing: "''A Shock to the System'' confounds our expectations and keeps us intrigued, because there's no way to know, not even in the very last moments, exactly which way the plot is going to fall."


See also

*
Helen Zahavi Helen Zahavi (born 1966) is an English novelist and screenwriter born and educated in London. Her father was sent to Britain with the Polish Army in the Second World War, while her mother's parents came from Odessa. Before becoming a writer, Zah ...
's novel '' Dirty Weekend'' (1991) for a story with a similar subject matter.


References


External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Shock To The System 1990 films 1990 comedy films 1990 crime thriller films 1990s black comedy films 1990s English-language films American films about revenge American black comedy films American crime thriller films Films based on British novels Films scored by Gary Chang Films set in New York City Films shot in New York City 1990s American films Films set in Connecticut