In the second entry in The Debuts, I Look at Jane Curtin in 1980's How to Beat the High Cost of Living

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

When I go to someone’s home for the first time, and it’s big and nice and expansive, my dumb brain always has the same stupid thought. I think that somewhere in their house must be a giant container of quarters, and if I only find it and somehow manage to furtively purloin the moolah, all of my money problems will be over.

There are a lot of problems with this line of thinking. For starters, it’s fucking stupid, something only a real maroon would believe. Yet, in my creaky cerebellum, the concept of a giant container full of spare change that will be my trip to fortune if I can only find it takes up valuable, permanent real estate all the same. 

That’s one reason I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Jane Curtin’s impressive 1980 motion picture debut, How to Beat the High Cost of Living. 

The timely yet timeless and universal heist comedy revolves around a giant ball of money in a mall that would make a permanent positive difference in someone’s or some people’s lives if they were to get their grubby paws on it. 

The money ball is like a giant version of the change jar of fortune that exists only in my odd imagination. 

How to Beat the High Cost of Living is explicitly rooted in the economic anxiety of the late 1970s and the inflation that plagued our country during the Carter administration. However, it was written by Robert Kaufmann in 1972. 

It went through a series of big-name stars before it hit theaters in 1980. The lead trio of unlikely thieves was played by Jessica Lange at the beginning of her film career, as well as Kate and Allie. That’s right: How to Beat the High Cost of Living stars both of the stars of the hit 1980s sitcom. 

Curtin stars in The High Cost of Living as Elaine, a housewife whose orderly existence is thrown into chaos when her husband leaves her for a much younger woman. The Shiksa Goddess drowns her troubles at a bar one lost evening and is pulled over while driving home by police officer Jack Heintzel (Dabney Coleman). 

I wanted to write about How to Beat the High Cost of Living because I have a massive crush on the young Jane Curtin, and I wrote up Laraine Newman’s debut in the last entry. But I also wanted to see it because Coleman just died, and I noticed he was in its stacked cast. 

Elaine is inebriated. In a desperate bid to get out of a drunk driving arrest and all of the cost, humiliation, and possible imprisonment that would entail, she throws herself at the police officer. 

Curtin plays her desperate former housewife as a woman convinced that the only card she has left is that she’s an attractive, sexually desirable white woman in a culture in which beauty is held in high esteem. 

Coleman’s cop is only human. So he knows that it is highly unethical to let a woman off because she’s gorgeous and comes on to you. Coleman’s complicated love interest is also married when he meets creepy with Elaine. This is the young Jane Curtin we’re talking about, however. I would break some laws and risk losing my job if she came on to me.  

Coleman should be highly unlikable. He’s an unfaithful police officer who can be manipulated and controlled by sex. Also, he’s played by Dabney Coleman, who made a good living playing heels, jerks, asshole bosses and all-around creeps. 

But the character isn’t unlikable or unrelatable. He’s strangely sympathetic. He’s also unexpectedly attractive. Curtin and Coleman have surprisingly explosive chemistry. 

Curtin plays her sardonic, sharp-witted antiheroine as a desperate survivor who has little going for her beyond her beauty and sexuality, so offering herself up to get out of any bind becomes her first resort. 

When her credit card is rejected and a gas station proprietor, played by Police Academy veteran Art Metrano, keeps her card, she throws herself at him in a failed attempt to get out of a jam. 

Jack is both put-off and turned on by Elaine’s seeming willingness to trade sexual favors for non-sexual favors. Her non-arrest leads to a tentative romantic relationship once he splits with his wife. 

Jessica Lange plays Louise, the gorgeous trophy wife of randy dentist Albert (Richard Benjamin). Louise owns an antique shop that is a real money pit, not unlike the crumbling house at the center of the Benjamin-directed 1986 comedy The Money Pit. 

For tax reasons, Albert sues his wife for costing him tens of thousands of dollars. This puts undue strain on their relationship. 

Susan Saint James rounds out the trio as a struggling single mother unsteadily navigating divorce and custody disagreements, a newly single father played by Eddie Albert whose wife left him for another woman, and a relationship with Robert (Fred Willard).

Willard is cast against type here as an everyman who is not a dithering idiot or some manner of comic boob. Willard delivers an uncharacteristically straightforward performance here in that he’s not a scene stealer or even particularly comic. 

The longtime friends and former high school cheerleaders desperately need money to help them out of their financial binds because inflation is making everyone’s life miserable. 

Elaine spies an unusual answer to her and her friends’ money problems. A mall has a big promotion, and a fortune will be given to the person who can guess exactly how much money is in the mall’s giant money ball.  

The trio does not have any experience with crime beyond drunk driving and trying to bribe a police officer, but that does not keep them from planning a heist that will land them all in jail if they’re caught. 

How to Beat the High Cost of Living is an unusual heist film in that it’s more concerned with the emotional lives of the unlikely robbers than the heist itself. 

During the heist, Elaine once again hilariously offers her sexuality up as a distraction when she performs an impromptu striptease that climaxes with full frontal nudity from a body double considerably bustier than the actress she’s doubling for. 

Movies about the casual cruelty of capitalism will always be timely, but I relate to the economic anxiety and free-floating fear at the film’s core on a painfully personal level. 

When I was a kid, I would confuse How to Beat the High Cost of Living with the conceptually similar Fun with Dick and Jane. That’s understandable, as both films are about middle-class, respectable folks who resort to crime. 

The film also resembles 9 to 5, but it’s better than both versions of Fun With Dick and Jane because it has empathy for its protagonists and also is genuinely funny. 

Curtin has had a very impressive career. She was on hit TV shows in the 1970s (Saturday Night Live), the 1980s (Kate & Allie), and the 1990s (Third Rock From the Left), but she was so beautiful, talented, and smart that it seems wrong that she never rocketed to superstardom. 

She had to settle for being extremely successful on television over a period of decades, which, honestly, isn’t too bad, even if I can’t help but feel like someone with her extraordinary gifts deserved more. 

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