In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.