March 25, 1994 | With Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen have perfected a trademark mixture of deadpan humor and visual hyperbole.  The Hudsucker Proxy offers more of the same -- a lot more -- to such a degree that the immense scale of the movie becomes an eye-popping, self-referential joke.

Imagine a movie with the upbeat sentiment of a Frank Capra classic, the cynical snappy patter of His Girl Friday or My Man Godfrey, and the flamboyantly overstated production design of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and you’ll have some idea what to expect of Hudsucker, a dazzling and sometimes dizzying hybrid of going-for-baroque style and screwball-comedy substance.

Working from a script they co-wrote with filmmaker Sam Raimi (Darkman, The Evil Dead ), the Coens -- Joel is director, Ethan is producer - have concocted an extravagant fable that plays like a post-modern version of a sassy, fast-talking comedy of the 1930s. Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), fresh off the bus from Muncie, Ill., arrives in 1958 Manhattan on the very same day that Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), the head of Hudsucker Industries, dives out the window of his 40th-floor boardroom. Norville, a recent graduate of the Muncie College of Business Administration, hopes to begin his career in the Hudsucker mailroom. Much to his amazement, however, he’s quickly named president of the company.

If Norville’s meteoric rise seems too good to be true, that’s only because it is. Without Norville’s knowledge, his rapid ascent has been plotted by Sidney J. Musburger (Paul Newman), a ruthless corporate kingpin who plans to buy Hudsucker stock on the cheap once he installs a boob as president. But -- surprise! -- Norville isn’t a boob. Or, at the very least, not a complete boob. He has a dandy idea for a new toy design that, unfortunately, doesn’t look too impressive on paper. (It’s a shame that the hilarious pay-off for this joke has already been revealed in ads for the film.) Hard-boiled reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) investigates Norville’s rise, and alleged boobishness, by working undercover as his secretary. When he reveals his true colors, she winds up falling for the big, not-so-dumb lug. Musburger, however, is considerably less impressed.

As Norville, Robbins manages the difficult feat of playing sweet-natured innocence with straight-faced ingenuousness. That is, rather than commenting on the character, he simply plays Norville with a chipper sincerity that is quite winning. Leigh tries something a bit more complicated, at once emulating and parodying the confident verve and rat-tat-tat line readings of classic screwball comedy heroines (i.e., Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby ). It’s a tricky balancing act, but she brings it off.

Newman clearly relishes his role as villain of the piece, and the pleasure he takes in his nastiness is very easy to share. There’s also a very funny cameo bit by Peter Gallagher, but exactly who he plays and what he does is a surprise that shouldn’t be spoiled.

The Hudsucker Proxy ultimately goes completely off the deep end when it dives into full-blown fantasy, suggesting that, as bright as they are, the Coens couldn’t find a more satisfactory way out once they’d painted themselves into a corner. But even after it becomes something less than an unalloyed delight, the movie continues to amuse and impress with its excess.