In February, I attended a one-off screening at Metrograph of the 1987 film “Making Mr. Right,” in which a young John Malkovich—in one of his first movie roles—stars both as a taciturn scientist named Jeff Peters and as Peters’s invention, a walking, talking android named Ulysses, who looks just like him. The film is a sci-fi screwball comedy involving robot-human romance.
There’s a scene in which Laurie Metcalf, playing a lab secretary who is obsessed with Jeff, accidentally goes on an ill-fated mall date with Ulysses. The film, shot in Miami, has a zany sense of style. The leading lady, a publicity executive played by the downtown artist Ann Magnuson, wears a Rolodex on her wrist as a fashion accessory.
Many other wacky things happen—I won’t spoil them for you here, because “Making Mr. Right,” a flop in its time, is worth watching. I had barely heard of it before this year, but I left the theatre believing that it is a stone-cold comedy classic.
The film’s director, the seventy-one-year-old Susan Seidelman, directed two of my other favorite films of the eighties—a time when the number of women helming feature films could be counted on one hand. Seidelman grew up in a Philadelphia suburb where, she told me recently, “everyone looked the same.” She attended film school at N.
Y.U. and filled her movies with the kinds of fashionable and funky strivers with whom she hung out downtown.
Her delightfully scrappy first feature, “Smithereens” (1982), cen.
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