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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.

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