Old Hollywood screwball comedies have inspired tributes and imitations by the hundreds, but only the Coen Brothers thought to combine it with German Expressionism in an outrageous grey soundstage New York City with sets (mammoth offices, mostly) that swallow the characters whole. Love it or hate it, there’s nothing else like it. In the end, 1994 was simply the wrong year for this underrated big-budget bomb. The arthouse audience that embraced the last two Coen films wasn’t enough to save it and it was too eccentric to pack the mall multiplexes. This story of a rank fool who gets offered the job of President of a major company as part of the Board of Directors’ plot to control the stock price is 100% froth, but it works. Its laughs are well-earned even when they don’t give you much to think about beyond Jennifer Jason Leigh’s perfect impression of the fast-talking 1940s movie career dame or Tim Robbins as a goofball who’s stumbled off the pages of a Preston Sturges script. The most fun conversation you have afterward is about who would have starred in this film had it been made in the 1930s or 40s. Katherine Hepburn is obvious for Jennifer Jason Leigh’s part, with Jean Arthur also a strong contender. For the Tim Robbins role, I’m going with some Sturges favorites and saying either Dick Powell or Eddie Bracken. As for Paul Newman’s ruthless well-heeled businessman, my pick is Eugene Pallette. The clever script (co-written with Sam Raimi) goes back to the mid-1980s, but it sat unmade for years because right from the start the vision for it was grand and expensive. The involvement of ultra-commercial producer Joel Silver (him and the Coens were a truly odd partnership, but, to his credit, Silver guaranteed them final cut) got it off the ground.