Skip to main content

The Man With One Red Shoe (1985)


"That's the trouble with surveillance! You don't get to see nothin'!"

 I'm going to start off with a confession: I goofed. 

 The Man With One Red Shoe was released a month before Volunteers, which was our previous entry, so we're just a smidge out of order. 

 That said, I had a lot of fun with this one. Hanx plays Richard, a violinist singled out at random by Ross, deputy director of the CIA, to confound a rival operative named Cooper. Ross leads Cooper to believe that Richard is a secret agent, which sees Richard unwittingly becoming targeted for surveillance and tangled in a web of espionage. 

 The film got off to a bit of a slow start, and I was finding the utter ineptitude of Cooper's team to be a bit ridiculous, but their bungling ransacking of Richard's apartment in the interest of uncovering evidence set up some moments that were amusing, if a little juvenile, later on. The whole thing plays like a drawn-out Three Stooges short, with Richard turning on his sink only to see water come shooting out of the shower head as a result of some incorrectly repaired plumbing by Cooper's lackeys and exhaling a stream of bubbles after brushing his teeth with what turns out to be shampoo that the spy team had inadvertently replaced in his toothpaste tube. It's definitely over the top at times, but it's a good bit of fun if you don't think about it too hard.

 The casting is really what makes this movie for me. The obvious Hanx aside, you've got Dabney Coleman as Cooper, who manages to be funny even when he's the straight man. Veteran actor Ed Hermann is the operative who reluctantly singles Richard out to be his fake spy, then later has an attack of conscience about it. Hermann has a presence onscreen that I've always enjoyed, so I was excited to see his name pop up in the opening credits. And of course there's the late, great Carrie Fisher as Paula, the wife of Richard's friend Morris (Jim Belushi, who I don't actually hate in this role), the merry prankster who is responsible for the titular red shoe. Richard is, incidentally, having a clandestine affair with Paula. That's what you get when you mess with a man's shoes, Morris. The only performance I really didn't enjoy was that of Lori Singer, who plays Maddy, the agent sent to pursue Richard who ends up falling for him. I've actually never seen her best-known film, Footloose (yeah, I know), but she's just utterly cardboard in this. I mean, how hard could it possibly be to pretend to love Tom Hanks? It's too bad nobody had discovered the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry he had with Meg Ryan at this point, because I think she'd have been far better suited for it. Apparently, she was too busy canoodling Scott Baio on Charles in Charge at this point (yes, really). Ah well. 

 Ultimately, this one falls right down the middle for me with regard to rankings in the Hanx catalog thus far. The story's a right mess, but the casting was almost spot-on. I'd still like to know where that other red shoe went, though.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Big (1988)

"I want to spend the night with you." "You mean sleep over? Okay, but I get to be on top." Picture, if you will, an adult Josh Baskin curled up in a fetal position in on the bed in a seedy motel room on his first night alone in New York City. Or jumping on a trampoline with Susan. Or playing keep-away from Paul with a racquetball. Now picture those scenes with Robert DeNiro. Because that's almost what happened. Given the natural youthful exuberance and easy charm he'd demonstrated in his roles to date, it's little wonder Tom Hanks was Penny Marshall's first choice for the lead role in her coming of age comedy about a boy who makes an impulsive wish and finds himself aging from 13 to 30 overnight. Unfortunately, Hanks' schedule was occupied with filming  Dragnet  and  Punchline . After several other actors were considered (John Travolta, Albert Brooks, and Kevin Costner, to name a few), De Niro was cast. He even prepped for the role...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here Comes the Hanks.

We were sitting at a traffic light when it happened. My husband and I were in San Diego for the weekend, enjoying a belated anniversary dinner while my in-laws had generously volunteered to babysit our son. We were in the car, headed for dinner at a restaurant that we'd been meaning to try for months, and I was futzing around on my phone (as I do), when he spoke up out of the blue. "I think we should do a year of Hanks." "What?" "Neither of us has seen all of Tom Hanks' movies, and I know you're a huge fan, so I think we should watch everything he's been in over a year or so." It took me a minute to process this suggestion that had come from seemingly nowhere. It's an established fact among those who know me well that I love Tom Hanks. It's not a movie star crush (I'm looking at you, Chris Pine) or a simple appreciation for the craft (Morgan Freeman, you inspire me). In a previous life, I was convinced, beyond the s...
1 comment
Read more

Volunteers (1985)

"He looks so old and wise!" "He's probably thirty." * Note: Unfortunately, it's taken me a bit of a while to blog about this one, as we've had quite a bit of upheaval in our personal lives as of late. That said... I'd never seen this movie before, and actually the only thing I knew about it was that it was the first movie Hanx worked on with his now-wife, Rita Wilson. Given that, I think I expected some sort of very sweet, playful on-screen chemistry between the two that reflects their real-life relationship, something along the lines of Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally... or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle.  Come to think of it, maybe Meg Ryan is just movie chemistry Match Light. I dunno. Regardless, that really wasn't the case here. Hanx plays Lawrence Bourne III, a spoiled, wealthy college student with a penchant for bad behavior (think Billy Madison in a tux with a really haughty Brahmin accent...
Post a Comment
Read more