Who's That Girl?

The other of the two movies on tonight's TCM prime-time lineup that I planned to blog about is a movie famous for being a bomb, Who's That Girl, which comes up at 2:15 AM.

The movie starts off with animated opening credits that are actually important in terms of establishing the plot, and not just a whimsical opening. Nikki Finn (played by Madonna) is a young woman in New York City who is given a key by her boyfriend Johnny, which she knows is to a safety deposit box, although she doesn't know what bank or what box number, or even what's in the box. She's on the run from some bad guys, and she gets into her car not realizing the bad guys have framed her by killing her boyfriend and putting his body in the trunk of her car. She's caught by the police, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison. (Why she never mentioned the key to her lawyers didn't seem to be mentioned as far as I could tell.)

Four years later, and with the movie switching to live action, Nikki is paroled, with a couple of caveats, notably that she's supposed to get on a bus immediately and go to her home town of Philadelphia, where she is to meet her parole officer. You'd think someone from the police or prison authorities would escort her to the bus station to get her on that bus, but somehow they expect somebody on the outside to do it for them.

Meanwhile, Loudon Trott (Griffin Dunne) is a tax attorney in New York who works for Mr. Worthington (John McMartin), father of Loudon's fiancée Wendy (Haviland Morris). Indeed, the wedding is supposed to be tomorrow, and you'd think most of the planning had already been done with everybody taking Friday off for the wedding. But then we wouldn't have a movie. Before Loudon can get back to dealing with wedding stuff, he's going to have to do two jobs for his future father-in-law. The first is to escort Nikki to the bus station, something which Worthington claims is part of the charity work the firm does. The other is to pick up a package for a client, wealthy Montgomery Bell (John Mills). Bell is taking delivery of a rare South American big cat as part of a repopulation scheme. The motorcycle deliveryman didn't realize the size of the package, or that it's a vicious-looking cat, so they'll need someone with a real car to deliver it.

As you can probably guess, Griffin picks up Nikki, and things immediately start going wrong. Nikki is pretty certain that there's evidence that will prove her innocence if she can get to that safety deposit box, but as I said, she doesn't know where that box is. Perhaps Griffin might have some idea, so she has him chauffeur her around Manhattan, trying to get to that box. Along the way, she's causing all sorts of chaos.

And she's also got people following her. There's Raoul the pimp and his assistant Benny, who are the ones who killed Johnny and framed Nikki, so they've got obvious reasons for wanting Nikki out of the way and getting the damning evidence themselves. But there's also a pair of police detectives who are the ones to have gotten Nikki out of jail, in the hopes that she could lead them to the evidence.

In true movie fashion, and most definitely not in real life fashion, Loudon hates Nikki at first, but finds himself falling in love with her along the way, especially once they complete Loudon's other job of delivering the panther to Bell. Everything eventually all comes together at the Worthington residence just in time for a wedding that goes haywire.

To me, it seemed fairly obvious that Madonna was trying to go for a screwball comedy vibe, with her success in Desperately Seeking Susan being more the model here than Shanghai Surprise, which had been a commercial failure. Critics at the time thought it didn't work, and savaged the movie. I can understand why, although I personally think the movie isn't nearly that bad. Nikki is annoying, but that's the way the character is written and not Madonna's fault. Most of the other actors are nonentities with the exception of Mills. And the movie is decidedly formulaic.

But even if you agree with most of the critics that Who's That Girl is terrible, you should watch and make that judgement for yourself.