The Woman in Red USA,
PG-13, 87 m, 1984
Gene Wilder dons three different hats as writer, director
and star of The Woman in Red, a wildly
uneven take on the 1976 French sex comedy Un éléphant ça trompe énormément (aka Pardon mon affaire). Wilder plays Teddy Pierce: husband, father,
friend, director of information (whatever the hell that is), and all-around
horndog. One morning he arrives at work and spots a voluptuous brunette in a red
dress (Kelly Le Brock) striding through the parking garage. As she happens over
a steam vent, her dress is blown upwards, exposing her red panties. She
hurriedly pushes down her dress and embarrassedly scoots off, oblivious to
Teddy’s presence. He smiles. But just as he’s about to file the episode away
in his spank bank, the mysterious woman comes back to do some sexy boogieing
atop the vent, her red dress undulating in the air à la The Seven Year Itch. Stevie Wonder’s
title ditty pops up on the soundtrack as the camera zooms in on Teddy’s
dumbstruck face. He’s hooked. Wife schmife, family schmamily! Teddy is going
to find a way to get into this impish gal’s ruby knickers. It turns out that the woman in red is doing some modeling
for a cable car campaign with Teddy’s agency. (The film takes place in San
Francisco.) He works up the nerve to ask her out, but in a manner that’s too
convoluted to get into here, winds up making the date with the office’s
resident wallflower, Ms. Milner (Gilda Radner). Due to some unforeseen
obligation to the ol’ ball and chain, Didi (a downright frumpy Judith Ivey),
Teddy misses the date, leaving Ms. Milner (to whom Wilder was married in real
life) in a posh restaurant with no one to keep her company but Mr. Jim Beam. So
he makes a second date, but AGAIN it’s with the wrong woman! When Teddy finds
Milner plain and small waiting for him at the eating place instead of his dream
gal, he yelps in horror and bounds for the door. If the fuggin’ dope had just
explained to her that their meeting was the result of some sort of mix-up, she
probably would’ve refrained from keying his car or dumping coffee all over his
desk. (She even tries to kill him at one point.) It’s hard to tell if Milner
is deriving any pleasure from fucking with Teddy; her expression remains oddly
apathetic even as she ratchets up her reign of terror. (She’s Jason Voorhees in
a hideous blouse and skirt combo.) Radner is made up to look gaunt and
washed-out, as if she’s succumbing to some horrid disease. Her ghostly
appearance is a bit unsettling, really, given the actress’s early demise to
cancer a few years later. When Teddy’s not getting his balls busted by Ms. Milner,
he’s thinking up new ways to score with the film’s titular T&A. He
learns that she’s into horseback riding, so he takes up the sport with
predictably disastrous results. When Teddy’s not getting thrown into mud
puddles by his temperamental mount, he’s hanging out with his buddies, though
God only knows what attracts him to this crew of boorish, philandering,
misogynistic miscreants. The ringleader, Joey (Joseph Bologna of Blame it on
Rio), is incapable of keeping his fly zipped, so his wife takes off with the
kids. When Joey and his buds show up at his now-deserted air-conditioned
nightmare, he flips out and wrecks the joint. This unsettling display
should’ve given Teddy pause when he was considering screwing around himself,
but he doesn’t give the matter a second thought. Joey’s outburst takes us by
surprise, largely because it happens in the picture’s first half-hour. We
haven’t had enough time to assess Joey’s character (other than he’s a
cocksman), so the scene lacks any emotional pull. It may have played better if
it had been put towards the end of the film. But The Woman in Red is full
of misplaced moments like that. It’s inefficiently structured. (Editor
Christopher Greenbury probably deserves as much blame for this as Wilder.) Teddy’s posse distracts from what should be the center of
the movie: the woman in red. No doubt about it, Le Brock is a stunning vision
(Fred Schuler’s camera adores her), and any red-blooded male can easily see
why Teddy goes gaga over her. (Though any woman would look desirable next
to the slob he’s married to.) But just when things start to heat up between
Teddy and his object of desire, Wilder is cutting to some other unnecessary
sub-plot. For starters, Teddy’s oldest daughter, Missy (Kyra Stempel), is
being courted by a weirdly sardonic punk rocker, Shelly (Michael Zorek sporting
a yellow Mohawk with red tips), who turns out to be a sexual deviant with a
fondness for mauling Mrs. Pierce’s knockers. And then there’s Teddy’s best
friend, Buddy (Charles Grodin), who’s something of a prankster. There’s an
out of nowhere scene with Buddy affecting the outward show of a blind man and
trashing an upscale restaurant with his shooter cane. The scene usually gets big
laughs, but what is it doing in this film? And what could the establishment have
possibly done that would justify Buddy sticking it with hundreds of dollars in
clean-up and repair bills? Did he have a beef with the snooty maître d’? Or
was he barred from the joint due to his penchant for the hairier sex? Whoops!
I’m afraid I just let the cat out the bag. But don’t get on my case for
spoiling the surprise; nobody will give a damn when it’s sprung—mostly
because it doesn’t relate to anything else that’s going on in this
(occasionally funny) mess. Truth be told, I usually don’t mind diversionary
scenes in movies (my brain tends to stray a bit from the plot now and again
anyhow), but most of those kinds of moments in The Woman in Red are just
plain stupid. Consider this example: When Teddy finally gets to take the
woman in red out on the town, he decides to swing by his grandma’s apartment
to wish her well on her 85th birthday. But when he arrives, there’s a
surprise party in honor of his birthday. So he has to bullshit his
grandma, his wife, his daughters, his business partner and his proctologist as
to why there’s a delicious piece of eye candy on his arm. Given what great
pains he’s undergone to keep his wife from getting wise to his two-timing
shenanigans, it’s unclear as to why Teddy would be so brazen as to bring the
woman in red over to a relative’s house. It’s fun to watch Teddy squirm
whenever he’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar (something Wilder excels
at), but the randomly funny parts in The Woman in Red do not add up to a
satisfying whole. Alas, when Teddy finally does get the woman in red alone in her modish high-rise apartment, things go, uh, south when it’s discovered that she, like Teddy, is spoken for and just shopping for some strange. When her husband—a 6’2” tall airline pilot—makes an unexpected visit, Teddy is forced to hide on the apartment’s window ledge. Wearing the husband’s oversized bathrobe and slippers, he sits puffing on a fag and reflecting on how he got into this pickle. On the street umpteen stories below, a crowd begins to form; the buzz is that Teddy is going to do himself in. The scene soon brings on the fire department and news cameras, and the ensuing media frenzy inspires Teddy to finally give up his foolish romantic pursuit. He jumps for the rescue team’s net, bidding adieu to the women in red forever. God almighty, all this heartache and subterfuge and the leading man never scores? The Woman in Red has even bluer balls than The Seven Year Itch, but on an off day like this, Gene Wilder still takes Tom Ewell to clown college. December 17, 2007 Ó Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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