Review of Woman in Red, The

Introduction

Smell that will you. That`s the scent of nostalgia emanating from this film. A regular mainstay of the Christmas schedules in the eighties, The Woman In Red (not to be confused with Chris De Burgh`s Lady In Red) appealed to me in my teenage years for some reason. It could be the Stevie Wonder soundtrack, which included the number one `I Just Called To Say I Love You`, but I`d be lying. It could be the wit, charm and comedy of Gene Wilder, but it`s more likely to be the image of Kelly Le Brock doing her best Marilyn Monroe atop a hot air vent, dressed all in red. Yeah, that`d be it. Twenty years on, I`m older and wiser… Well I`m older and that scent of nostalgia is beginning to be a little whiffy.

Starring as well as written and directed by Gene Wilder, The Woman In Red begins with our hero in a bathrobe, perched precariously atop a window ledge musing with a passing seagull just how he came to be in such a predicament. You see Theodore Pierce was a happily married advertising executive with two kids, just living his life, when out of the blue he encountered Charlotte, the titular woman in red. From that moment he had to have her, and when he learnt that she was the face of one of his company`s advertising campaigns, it became possible to get close to her, with the help of his friends of course, and avoiding his wife finding out. Unfortunately the course of true lust never runs smoothly, especially when after some crossed lines, he arranges a date with co-worker Ms Milner by mistake.

Video

The Woman In Red gets the back catalogue treatment from MGM. A 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer is distinctly mundane. There`s a bit of print damage, some grain and a slight degree of softness. But on the whole the picture is clear and colourful. Eighties hair and eighties fashion provide Ms Le Brock plenty of opportunities to look fine.

Audio

Catering for the European Union, this disc has a fine selection of soundtracks, DD 2.0 Surround English, French and Italian as well as DD 2.0 German and Spanish. There are many, many fine language subtitles should you need them. This is a dialogue heavy film and that dialogue is clear throughout. There`s a bit of surround ambience for some thunder but other than that it`s hardly called upon. A high point of the film is the music supplied by Stevie Wonder; it gives you something to pay attention to when Kelly isn`t on screen.

Features

Trying to find new ways to say "Absolutely nothing at all" is beginning to be the bane of my existence.

Conclusion

The mist of teenage hormones has lifted and seeing The Woman In Red after all these years is almost a rude awakening as to how bad this film truly is. This is Gene Wilder`s midlife crisis, played out on screen for all to see. That must be what this film is, because as a comedy it certainly isn`t funny, as a romance it`s utterly bland and as a drama it`s just insipid. A man sees the girl of his dreams and instantly throws his life away over a pretty face; this is the hero that we must empathise with as he goes about attempting to cheat on his wife. His friends are merely partners in crime who make light of doing the same, then act hurt when they get found out.

The characters are hard to like, and are poorly written. We are meant to believe that happily married Theodore Pierce played by Gene Wilder is ready to throw away his family after a mere glimpse of Kelly Le Brock. His wife Didi is assumed to be stable, but at the first mention of infidelity reveals a streak of jealousy that her husband of twenty odd years was previously unaware of, and she then produces a gun. Perhaps harder to accept is that supermodel Charlotte (Kelly Le Brock) will fall for this bumbling fool that has up this point effectively been stalking her. This film is a catastrophe of gargantuan proportions. I was waiting for a laugh to come along, but to extend the bus metaphor, instead of three laughs all turning up at once, all the gag writers were on strike. Wilder and Le Brock have no chemistry and Gilda Radner is wasted in an ephemeral role. The only people to come out of this film with some semblance of dignity are Le Brock, who as the object of affection looks supremely sultry, and Charles Grodin, who as gay friend Buddy is perhaps the only sympathetic character in the film.

This is Gene Wilder`s midlife crisis, and I guess if I were in his position, writer director and star, I`d write myself into a few salacious scenes with a starlet de jour too. It would remain a cherished home movie though. But it`s quite odd that in this vehicle, Wilder succumbs to an eventual humility in that he doesn`t succeed in fulfilling all his midlife fantasies. Perhaps it was having the missus on set that finally dissuaded him. I think I should retract my earlier statement. Gene Wilder`s The Woman In Red is all too confusable with Chris de Burgh`s Lady In Red. Both of them created by people who should have known better, and briefly cast a hypnotic charm on audiences, but who now feel a slight nausea at the recollection. There are only two things worth the 83 minutes of The Woman In Red, and a more fulfilling alternative would be to shell out on a Stevie Wonder album and a poster of Kelly Le Brock. Or do what I do, and pray that Weird Science gets a DVD release anytime soon. Please, pretty please?