Shark Parade TIN MEN

By RICHARD CORLISS

In blue-collar Baltimore, 1963, these guys have Palm Springs tans. They drive Cadillacs that pull into their parking spaces like a Thanksgiving Day parade of metal sharks. Who are they -- the Mob? More like the lost patrol. They are middle-aged men without women, salesmen peddling an obsolete product: themselves. They take an artist's pride in the egregious frauds they dream up ) to sell some aluminum siding to a gullible homeowner. Ask them why they spend all this creative energy either on the job or drinking it off, and they will probably confess that they do it to support a family they rarely see and in whom they have no more than a patron's interest. The losers among them, like Tilley (Danny DeVito), just want to score big. The winners, like B.B. (Richard Dreyfuss), just want to get out.

Tin Men is the middle-class tragedy played as sprightly farce. B.B.'s virgin Caddy, with one-sixteenth of a mile on it, collides with Tilley's car. B.B. steals Tilley's restless wife (Barbara Hershey). Tilley defenestrates his wife's clothes and assaults the intruding B.B. with eggs and tomatoes. Barry Levinson, who worked this territory with a younger ensemble in Diner, has the nice idea of making a movie about what people actually do. He also has the ingenuity to give surprising twists to the taffy of his plot. And like a best pal, he knows how to listen, to find obsessions in the sprung rhythms of everyday speech. Levinson has found the perfect cast for this comic elegy; each actor's face is a subtle caricature of ordinary futility. In fact, most of the movie is pretty funny, if you can convince yourself that these people are a whole lot of somebody elses.