The movie begins when Bill Babowsky (Richard Dreyfuss), backing his new Cadillac out of the dealer's lot, gets hit by Ernest Tilley (Danny DeVito), distracted by an argument with his wife, Nora (Barbara Hershey), earlier that morning. The accident begins a nasty feud between the men, both of whom have their livelihoods threatened by the new Home Improvement Commission, which is investigating scams in the siding business.
The thing about "Tin Men," though, is that it in no way feels like a small movie. Bill and Ernest's rivalry is petty and mean, but it drives Bill to reckon with his glibness and Ernest with his anger. Nora is a fully realized person, experiencing the urges that would fuel the second-wave feminist movement a few years later ("Tin Men" is set in 1963), rather than simply a pawn in Bill and Ernest's games. And in languid, talky scenes at Ernest's favorite diner, or the Pimlico racetrack, or a lounge where the Fine Young Cannibals play themselves as the house band, Levinson paints a beautiful, wide-ranging portrait of Baltimore.
"Tin Men" is one of those movies that has sympathy for all of its characters, and not in a milquetoast sort of way. Ernest is cantankerous to the point of self-destruction, while Bill is a flamboyant ladies' man who has neglected his inner life. They behave dreadfully during their feud: Bill pretends to be a widower and lies about his occupation to seduce Nora, while Ernest hits Bill over the head and pelts him with moldy tomatoes and eggs, prompting a hilarious police report.
But their sniping at each other comes to serve a purpose. When Bill genuinely falls for Nora, he must apologize to her for what he has done and convince her that he's sincere. "I never had anyone to call before, but I figured I'd better call," he tells her from a hospital pay phone after his partner Moe (John Mahoney) suffers a heart attack, slightly stunned by the fact that he even has the impulse to check in with a girlfriend.
Ernest blames everyone for his problems, which include Nora's desertion, a serious slump in his salesmanship and his failure to pay $4,000 in back taxes. But as his troubles mount, Ernest has to reckon with his own temperament, and with the fact that he can't use argument to hold off the inevitable consequences of his mistakes.
Levinson makes subtle use of Baltimore's architecture and geography to heighten tension and to add character shading. The city's hills make the initial car accident worse than it might have been. The alleys that would come to feel like death traps in David Simon's "The Wire" are already shabby in "Tin Men," but both Bill's and Ernest's offices are located off these side streets, a sign that their occupation is marginal, not that they're in any sort of danger.
When Nora and Ernest squabble on their front porch early in the film, the shot captures an arcade made by the porch roofs on all the adjoining houses. Their narrow kitchen becomes the setting for a conversation about the claustrophobic nature of their social life as a couple; Bill turns out to live in a big, open loft with raw, unfinished walls and furniture still covered in plastic, the apartment illustrating his more modern style and the way he has failed to nurture more substantial parts of himself.
Later, when Nora leaves Ernest for Bill and Ernest throws all her clothes and cosmetics onto the street, the scene feels particularly humiliating because of how close the houses are together; their domestic discord has spilled over not just onto their front yard, but into their neighbors' lives. After Ernest is evicted from the house, he falls asleep in his car with the city's famous neon Domino Sugars billboard serving as his nightlight.
Levinson also shows a sharp grasp of race in Baltimore, even though it's hardly the subject of the movie. In 1963, Baltimore was still a decade away from becoming a majority-minority city, a transition that happened between the 1970 and 1980 Censuses: In 1960, about 35 percent of the city was non-white.
While Levinson's main characters, their co-workers and their customers are white, the Baltimore of "Tin Men" reflects what would become a rapid demographic turnover. The crowd that gathers around Bill and Ernest's initial confrontation is black and white. When the two men run into each other after a day at Pimlico, Levinson captures Ernest walking down an alley where grooms, all of them African-American, tend the horses who have just finished competing. In the final sequence, when Ernest leaves the hearing at which he loses his salesman's license, only to find that the Internal Revenue Service has repossessed his car, it's an African-American boy who tells him what has happened, and one of Baltimore's distinctive horse-drawn fruit carts clatters by, led by a black peddler.
And for all that "Tin Men" is a personal story, it's one rooted in Baltimore institutions and bureaucracy. Nora works at the Social Security Administration, and it's at a party for a pregnant co-worker who is leaving the agency that she tells a friend that she has decided she wants to sleep with someone else. "I have to," she explains. "I have to. I want to know what it's like to be with someone else. Because if what I got with Tilley is as good as it gets — I gotta know." (When she goes out dancing with Bill, the Fine Young Cannibals happen to be playing their song "Social Security" in a move that's both showy and too good to resist).
Bill and Ernest's rivalry takes place against a series of hearings by the Home Improvement Commission, which is cracking down on the kinds of frauds that both men employ in their work. Bill and Moe use a brilliant scheme where they pose as photographers for Life Magazine and tell homeowners that they're shooting their houses for "before" pictures for a story about the benefits of siding. Ernest, a rougher man, invents a con where he promises customers free siding that he has estimated at an inflated value, then has his partner tell the marks that he suffered a mental breakdown, talking them into paying a reduced price for the work to save Ernest's job.
They're both cheerfully crooked, but that doesn't stop it from being a bit melancholy when they're thrown out of work. Bill finds out that Stanley (Alan Blumenfeld), a new recruit to his company, is working undercover for the Commission; after Moe's heart attack, Bill recognizes that he needs to make changes in his life and leaks incriminating information to Stanley so that he can get kicked out of the business on his own terms. (Bill had been having visions of selling Volkswagons even before he started thinking seriously about getting out of the siding business.) Ernest's boss, Wing (J.T. Walsh), sacrifices Ernest to the Commission, telling him that because Ernest is a low seller, Wing can use his firing to prove that he's cracking down on corruption in his firm and keep the whole business afloat.
"You know what our big crime is?" Bill tells Ernest as they drive off together, discussing plans for a new business. "We're nickle- and-dime guys. Just small-time hustlers that got caught because we were hustling nickles and dimes."
Generations later, another fictional resident of Baltimore would warn her husband that "The game is rigged, but you cannot lose if you do not play." "Tin Men" captured a moment in Baltimore when it still seemed exciting, rather than futile, to get in the game.
