“Risky Business” (1983)
And so we come to the end of our journey, with a little film you may have heard of: “Risky Business” — only the third of four films that Cruise would release in 1983 (the last being “All The Right Moves“). The story of a privileged, Princeton-bound teen who gets into trouble while his parents are away and, with the help of the call girl he falls for (Rebecca de Mornay) hits on the wizard scheme of running a one-night brothel to pay off his various debts, on paper it’s not the most promising of star-making vehicles. But Cruise really goes for it, and somewhere around the time he slides into the living room sporting nothing but socks, a pink shirt and a candlestick/microphone, it appears the world woke up to Tom Cruise TM. It helps that the film, though it roughly shares a genre with the same year’s vastly inferior “Losin’ It,” is an altogether sharper, tighter, better-written affair (writer/director Paul Brickman seldom gets enough props for that), so that it comes across more as satire than slapstick, spicing it’s caper-ish antics with some fairly pointed commentary. And Cruise is really very good in it, navigating the trickier aspects of his character’s moral ambivalence with ease, and turning in a confident performance that would set up the cocksure but charming persona he would default to time and again in the coming years, most notably with “Top Gun.” In fact, it’s the first evidence we really have of the central conundrum of Cruise’s star image: in anyone else, that air of smugness — the expectation that the world will give him what he wants because it owes him — would be totally off-putting. But maybe Cruise’s greatest talent is knowing just when to pull back from the brink of all-out arrogance and show us something real, or goofy, or awkward underneath the bravado. It’s those moments, which catch the light like the flaws in a diamond, that stop us from despising his character here and in future incarnations. And that’s maybe as close as we’re going to get to explaining his long-lasting appeal: Cruise can behave like an asshole, he can win the way assholes win, but he gives us just bare-minimum-enough of a glimpse inside to let us believe he’s not, in fact, an asshole. Cue Moms wanting to rescue him; cue teenage girls sighing over the tenderness they spy within; cue teenage boys furiously taking notes. Cue stardom.
The rest is, of course, movie history. Next up, in 2014, Cruise will be jumping out of buildings in 3D in service of yet another sci-fi epic in Doug Liman‘s “All You Need Is Kill,” which sounds kinda like “Groundhog Day” with warring aliens (proper synopsis here), potentially to be followed by Rupert Sanders‘ “Van Helsing,” and/or Guy Ritchie‘s “The Man From UNCLE” before the probably Christopher McQuarrie-directed “Mission Impossible 5“ arrives in 2015. Nope, Cruise ain’t going nowhere. Except maybe out the window of that skyscraper one more time.
