It’s some of the most disarmingly stinging social commentary in a mainstream movie of the time AND a young Rebecca De Mornay gets naked. That’s a pretty good deal if you ask me. This film takes the classic teen sex comedy scenario in which parents toodle-oo off to vacation and leave their angst-ridden adolescent home alone to get into big trouble, but from there writer/director Paul Brickman lays on us the kind of cynicism that cools our jets and leads us to expect the worst (but in a good way). Tom Cruise, in the very last microseconds of his career in which he was still almost believable as a virginal high schooler whose friends are getting laid while he’s still jerkin’ and dreamin’, is a good boy groomed for the Ivy League. He plans to study business, which Brickman thinks is hilarious. Brickman dresses down those ambitions here by giving Cruise the best business education he’ll ever get in his life when he hires a call girl, bangs her all night and then owes her more money than he expects the next morning. So, Cruise goes out to cash in a savings bond (a childhood gift from his grandparents, who probably hoped that he’d spend it toward his education, and he does, just not in the way they imagined) and comes back to find that the bitch has already left and stolen his mother’s prized stupid expensive fireplace mantle decoration crystal egg as payment. He goes out to get this useless trinket back, gets into trouble, gets chased by a gun-toting pimp, sinks his father’s Porsche in a lake and stumbles into a fine moneymaking opportunity along the way. To an ominous Tangerine Dream score, it’s a film that reduces capitalism to pimps, hookers, theft and and base opportunism. It knocks on the tin surface of the American Dream and hears the hollow echo inside.
Paul Brickman may have been too cynical even for Hollywood. Oh, they wanted him. After Risky Business became a giant hit due to how greatly entertaining it is (and it sealed the deal on Tom Cruise’s burgeoning stardom; it’s still one of his signature roles), Brickman got offered damn near every classic comedy over the next fifteen years.
And he turned ’em all down. Or at least none of them ever panned out. He became one of those movie business anomalies who hits it big and then abandons the spotlight. He only directed one other film, Men Don’t Leave, seven years later and then that was that.