The Woman in Red

I bought a DVD set of four unrelated 80s comedies some time back to get a copy of Throw Momma From the Train. I hadn't seen any of the other three movies at the time I picked up the set, and got through them very slowly. I recently finally watched the last of them, The Woman in Red.

Gene Wilder, who directed as well as adapting the screenplay from a 1970s French movie, plays Ted Pierce, an adman in San Francisco who, at the start of the movie, is standing on a window ledge as though he's about to commit suicide. He wonders how he got to this point, and realizes that it started several weeks back. Cue the obligatory flashback....

Ted was driving into work one morning, parking his car in the basement of the parking garage below the building where he works. Just before he can get out of the car, he sees a young woman walking through the basement, stopping on a grate and imitating the famous Marilyn Monroe scene from The Seven Year Itch. Ted is intrigued by this, because what man wouldn't be intrigued by a beautiful woman who has that sort of incident with her skirt. Of course, Ted also happens to be married to Didi (Judith Ivey) with kids at home.

It turns out that the woman is a model, Charlotte (Kelly LeBrock), who's part of an ad campaign in the next office over for San Francisco's cable cars. But the bigger point is that her being in the next office with just a floor-to-ceiling glass divider between them is going to give Ted more time to look at this lovely woman. Eventually, he does decide to try to meet her, by calling the extension in the next room.

But for most of the movie, things go badly wrong in Ted's attempts to hook up with Charlotte. The first time around, even though it looks like Charlotte is the only one near the phone, another woman, Mrs. Milner (Gilda Radner) answers it and takes up Ted's offer of a date. And then one of Ted's friends, Joe (Joseph Bologna), is caught having an affair and dumped extremely unceremoniously by his wife who takes everything but the house. But Ted's friends are still willing to help him.

Complicating matters is the fact that up to this point, Ted has always been extremely faithful to Didi, which makes you wonder why he'd suddenly think of stepping out on his wife with this woman. There's also the question of what's going to happen when the affair gets found out, because surely there's no way he can keep it a secret if he is actually able to hook up with Charlotte. And Charlotte has some secrets of her own....

The critics back in the 1980s didn't give The Woman in Red the best of reviews back in 1984, and it's not difficult to see why. Much of the movie seems like a strung-together collection of gags that don't quite work put together. Worse, Ted is supposed to be a nice guy, and yet here he is doing something that's fundamentally mean to his wife. And we're supposed to root for him.

The Woman in Red is probably better known for its soundtrack, or more specifically one song off that soundtrack. Wilder was able to get Stevie Wonder to do the soundtrack, and among the songs is the Oscar-winner "I Just Called to Say I Love You", which is way overplayed on those soft rock and "greatest hits of all time" radio stations to this day.

I can think of a lot of Gene Wilder movies I'd recommend before recommending The Woman in Red.