The Man with One Red Shoe

One Red Shoe has trying moments (the sewer-man joke; the awful fate of Belushi’s character), but the rest of it whirls by as summer comedy ought to, and rarely does.

Fans of the droll style of actor Tom Hanks will chuckle through The Man With One Red Shoe, a story that builds a comic house of cards on a mistaken identity. [20 July 1985, p.4]

Leave it to an American production team to remake the same premise into an inarguably worse movie. And this insufferable remake called The Man with One Red Shoe marks the second time in as many years that producer Victor Drai, a former estate developer, has taken a French movie and turned it into garbage. Last year he took the genuinely amusing ''Pardon Mon Affair'' and reworked it with the help of the increasingly annoying Gene Wilder into ''The Lady in Red,'' one of the year`s worst movies.

It settles uneasily on the back of a verbal comic like Hanks—the movie keeps setting up gags that never quite materialize, and Hanks, unable to fill out his underwritten part with slapstick, is left stranded. Without any big laughs to even out the film's tone, the balance gradually shifts to the grim paranoia of the basic conception, and the movie that emerges seems oddly bleak and melancholic.

It's mostly just slight, and none of it elicits more than the mildest of chuckles.

Both of us have seen "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe," the French comedy that inspired this Hollywood retread. The French movie is about a case of mistaken identity. The American movie is about the same case of mistaken identity. The French have a name for this phenomenon: deja vu. So do we: ripoff.

Nearly unwatchable.

This light comedy film is another of Tom Hanks' early career films. He gives life to a totally normal guy who is randomly chosen to be watched by the CIA as a spy because of an internal rivalry within the agency . The biggest problem with this film is the very exaggerated and improbable script. Halfway through the film, I had already forgotten the issue that gave rise to everything, the Senate audit and internal CIA rivalries. It is simply too complicated for a light film like this, and makes everything else look totally silly, with professional secret agents watching over the life of a totally normal guy without anyone realizing that there was absolutely nothing special about him. I understand that this is also part of the comedy, with all its nonsense, but I think it didn't work well. The only good thing about this film is Hanks good performance, still far from fame and acclaim, but also relatively raw in his acting. Beside him, Lori Singer gave a good support and Jim Belushi is good at comedy, but everything else is darkened behind the work of the three actors that I highlighted here.