We meet some of the women in his life, including his mistress (Fran Drescher) and his ex-wife (Pamela Reed), and we also get a look at the sexpot, Donna (Annabella Sciorra), who works in the dealership's front office. Everybody on the sales force feels libidinous about her, except for supersaleswoman Lila (Lori Petty), who leads the staff in sales, perhaps because she has one less distraction.
Up until this point, the movie seems to be a setup for a big sales contest in which lies will be told and dirty tricks pulled. But then Donna's husband (Tim Robbins) comes crashing in through the plate glass window on his motorcycle, waving a machinegun and threatening to kill everyone. And then the movie becomes an extended dialogue between Williams and Robbins, as the salesman tries to do the best selling job of his life on the distraught husband.
Williams and Robbins (who played the young pitcher in "Bull Durham") are convincing in this long sequence, which is built by director Roger Donaldson and writer Ken Friedman into a series of peaks and valleys, complicated by the arrival of the husband of Williams' mistress. But somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with "Cadillac Man" were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen, and maybe if Robbins had come crashing in through the window in the first scene I would have liked it more.
One footnote: Two scenes in the movie feature Lauren Tom as the waitress at the nearby Chinese restaurant. You've met waitresses like this before; small women who take a delight in talking back to their clients and banging them on the head with the menu when they order the wrong thing. Miss Tom steals both scenes with a performance that's funnier than anything else in the movie. Sometimes TV sitcoms are spun out of characters like hers, and I'd love to see them try one this time.
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