Graham is in no mood to be panhandled on the subway, and a rash moment has him shoving a homeless man in front of a train. Graham’s very bad day includes hearing his old boss and confidante (John McMartin) is out, and that instead of using his shiny gold lighter to torch old George’s cigars, it’s Benham who expects that form of kowtowing. The “vibrant and youthful” Benham is always going on and on about his sailboat, popular and a bit of a kiss-up.

It’s 1990, and the younger subordinate ( Peter Riegert) with computer tracking ideas he barely understands gets promoted over Graham. “He’d always fancied himself a sorcerer.” Here he is, on his umpteenth attempt to restart the power after his monied ditz of a wife ( Swoosie Kurtz) has popped it off with her latest stairmaster, trapped in a big mortgage with two giant poodles, depending on a long-overdue promotion to get right.Īnd when that promotion doesn’t come, that epiphany takes shape in his interior monologues.

The Jan Egleson film, based on a Simon Brett novel, opens with Graham in the basement of his rail-commute Jersey suburb, grabbing a pipe to steady himself as he turns on a light, and getting a serious jolt. The distribution was haphazard, at best, and we only knew about it because Siskel & Ebert championed it from the bully pulpit of whatever TV show they were doing at the time.Ĭaine plays Graham Marshall, a Brit in American marketing, a husband in a dysfunctional marriage and a man with a murderous interior life. “A Shock to the System,” a deliciously dark comedy in a minor, murderous key, is one of the many minor gems on Michael Caine’s cinema resume.īut what those of us old enough to recall seeing it in a theater was how lucky we were.

It came and it went, without most anyone noticing.

Shock to the system