Romancing The Stone – A great 1984 action adventure that can easily compared to Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981), except that it has more heart, there are no Nazis (in fact, with the thrust-together spoiled entertainment queen/adventurer combo it’s more like a much improved version of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, ironically also released in 1984).
The film starts off with a fantasy scene from the pages of unlucky-in-love romance writer (no men in her life, but her cat is named Romeo) Joan Wilder. Great, cheezy dialogue: “That was the end of Grogan, the man who murdered my father, raped my mother and sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog and stole my Bible.” Great mud-slide scene with Michael Douglas landing in the swamp face-down between Kathleen Turner’s legs. Wow. Nice arguments between Douglas and Turner. “You’re a mondo-dismo. A man who takes money from stranded women!” Great scene in the smugglers’ crashed plane (Grateful Dead t-shirt, mummified pilot, keys for the fire, old newspaper, “Oh no – the Doobie Brothers broke up!”). Hilarious drug smuggler village scene, the head smuggler has all of Joan Wilder’s books, big smiles on all the hard-ass faces. “Juanita!!” To Michael Douglas: “Get the door.” Lupe’s escape river jump. “I can go no further – after this village I am a wanted man!”
Great movie, wonderful how Kathleen Turner saves the day more often than Michael Douglas does. Also like how Turner starts off the film dowdy and buttoned-up, but then gets looser… and hotter. Too bad the music is just so horribly awful, though. Danny De Vito is wonderful, calling his cousin Ira “bullet-head.”
I learned that the screenplay was by one Diane Thomas, a Malibu waitress who died in a car crash shortly after the film’s release. Tough break. Comparisons to Raiders Of The Lost Ark were inevitable in 1984, although the screenplay was actually five years older (and is probably the better film in an acting sense – Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas nearly get equal screen time, and she’s just as much a heroic figure as he is, doing all the same stunts, and dispatching the bad guy on her own – Douglas has trouble scaling a rock wall and arrives too late to help her, ha ha ha…).
This DVD contains nearly 20 minutes of deleted scenes, but nothing special there. There are also scenes from some sort of useless agent that Joan Wilder has, he doesn’t appear in the final movie at all.