RINGWALD WITH DOWNEY JR. PLAYING 'THE PICK-UP ARTIST'

rating: ***

When the group of BREAKFAST CLUB actors, warming their bones by ST. ELMO’S FIRE following the initial sweet SIXTEEN CANDLES party, a few performers escaped the infamous label that might have tarnished their careers… After all, who can take a brat seriously… especially if there’s a whole pack of them?

year: 1987

Well Robert Downey Jr. appeared in both WEIRD SCIENCE and JOHNNY BE GOOD with Anthony Michael Hall; LESS THAN ZERO with Andrew McCarthy; and then this little known, quirky romance with Molly Ringwald...

And so, as the title, THE PICK-UP ARTIST, implies, Robert has a line for every beautiful woman on the street – from typical lanky supermodels to more artistically cute starlets (like Anne Bobby, shown above)... He almost always winds up with a phone number... until something happens... A vision in the form of redhead Ringwald’s Randy Jensen who, hanging out at a mob-run nightclub and in debt with gangster Harvey Keitel, is anything but a damsel in distress...

She's assertive and opinionated and unfortunately, for a guy like Downey’s Jack Jericho, where the chase is everything, very loose and progressive – they’re in back of his car within hours of meeting, and, afterwards, she's not smitten: He’s just another number... In fact she doesn't even want his... Which causes Jack to drop his skirt-chasing habit and he has but one goal: to get Randy and "friend" Dennis Hopper out of debt. And there’s something new around every corner of this diamond in the rough rom-com: Although the best moments have Downey by himself trying to wheel his way into, out of, around and about schemes with a wry likeable countenance, no surprise to his IRON MAN fan base. And this kind of quirky crime flick would become normal in just a few years, making it either ahead of its time or not fully cooked.

Molly Ringwald faces Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel threatens Molly Ringwald

Lorraine Bracco in a bit part (she was Keitel's girlfriend at the time)

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