The Associate

Laurel Ayres is a sharp financial analyst on Wall Street who does the work while a male colleague takes the credit. When a promotion she deserves goes to him instead, she leaves to open her own advisory firm. She soon finds that clients will not put their money in the hands of a woman, so she invents a male business partner, Robert S. Cutty, and presents herself as his representative. The fiction works and her business grows, but success brings its own problem: clients and rivals alike want to meet the elusive Mr. Cutty, and a police inquiry into her supposed partner forces her to keep the deception alive.

The Associate was directed by Donald Petrie and written by Nick Thiel. It is the fifth of the twelve features Petrie directed, arriving between The Favor and My Favorite Martian, and it follows his run of comedies through the early and mid-1990s. Whoopi Goldberg plays Laurel, with Dianne Wiest, Eli Wallach, Tim Daly, Bebe Neuwirth and Austin Pendleton among the credited cast of forty-two. The production, backed by Universal Pictures with PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Hollywood Pictures and Interscope Communications, cost about 23 million dollars and took roughly 13 million worldwide, a modest return. On IMDb it holds 6.2 from around 9,700 votes, and on TMDB 6.2 from about 245; a critics' rating of 5.2 from 18 reviews places it slightly below those audience scores.