Overboard

Kurt Russell's birthday is on March 17, which is St. Patrick's Day, so unsurprisingly TCM will be running a bunch of Irish-themed movies that day instead of Kurt Russell films. Instead, TCM has a double-feature of Kurt Russell's movies tomorrow morning concluding at 8:00 AM with Overboard.

Russell plays Dean Proffitt, a handyman carpenter in the coastal Oregon town of Elk Cove who has a rather modest living. That's because he's a widower with four kids, and has more or less decided that he's going to give his four sons the minimum of what they need and otherwise let them grow up on their own.

Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) is fabulously wealthy, living on her yacht with her husband Grant Stayton III (Edward Hermann). Joanna basically spends her days making life hell for everyone around her, with the closest to her other than her husband being her butler Andrew (Roddy McDowall). Their yacht docks in Elk Cove, which is how Joanna first meets Dean. She's dissatisfied with her suite on the yacht, and wants a new closet. So she hires someone and gets Dean. Since she's so nasty, however, she decides not to accept a closet made of oak, an won't pay Dean one red cent out of the $600 Dean charges, even eventually throwind Dean and all his tools overboard.

Later that evening, Joanna has to go back up on deck to retrieve her wedding ring. As you can probably guess from the title of the movie, in the dark she slips and falls overboard, with nobody recognizing that she's gone missing until it's too late. She's picked up by a garbage scow, but... she has the sort of case of amnesia that one only gets in the movies or on soap operas.

The yacht is still close enough to Elk Cove that it can receive the local TV broadcasts, and so Grant sees the mug shot of the lady who doesn't know who she is and is in the psychiatric unit of the hospital, realizing that the woman is of course his wife. Grant goes to the hospital to retrieve her, and then decides that Joanna has been such a jerk that he's going to say no, he this isn't his wife, and go back to the yacht and party.

Dean also sees the news reports, and decides that he's going to get some revenge on Joanna for the way she treated him. He claims that the mystery woman who doesn't remember who she is is in fact his wife Annie. Fortunately for Dean, Joanna had been wearing such a skimpy bathing suit that he recognized a birthmark in a sensitive area, something only a husband could be expected to know.

Dean takes "Annie" home with him, expecting to have he work just enough to pay off the $600 for the closet. But any number of things happen that again, you can probably guess. Dean's children come to learn that they need a mother, and would like her to stay. Dean finds himself falling in love with Annie, even if he doesn't want to admit it. And Annie likes the children, although she's not so certain that she likes Dean.

You also know that Grant is going to come back into Annie's life, although that occurs in part from the proding of Joanna's mother (Katherine Helmond). It's the presence of Grant that finally wakes up Annie from her amnesia, and she has a choice to make, although again, you can probably figure out what's going to happen.

Overboard is a predictable movie, but the sort of thing that works well thanks to the chemistry and acting of the cast. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn have been together for close to 40 years now, and even though they'd only been together for a few years at the time they made Overboard, they look like they belong together. The kids are obnoxious at times like most movie kids, but that's in part because the script requires it for the first half of the movie. Hermann and Helmond show themselves to be fairly adept at comedy, too.

The plot of Overboard requires a fair bit of suspension of belief, but if you can do that, it's a really enjoyable little 1980s movie. It's also available on DVD and Blu-Ray if you miss the TCM showing.