1985's Dire The Man With One Red Shoe Wastes an Amazing Supporting Cast and a Young Tom Hanks

Damn you, Francis Veber!

Writer, director and one man industry Francis Veber’s life and career stand as a powerful refutation of the idea that French filmmakers are arty, ambitious Bohemians in berets monologuing pretentiously about the world’s ills. 

Veber proves that French writers and directors can be every bit as formulaic, commercial, mercenary and nauseatingly high concept as their American counterparts. 

By cranking out the most cynical, mercenary product imaginable and aiming squarely for the lowest common denominator Veber became a massive commercial force on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The American Francis Veber remake is a mini-genre onto itself, a cinematic Hall of Shame that contains such abominations as 1982’s crazily racist The Toy, which famously cast Richard Pryor as a human gift a rich white asshole buys for his jackass son, the 1994 incest and statutory rape-themed family My Father the Hero and 1997’s Father’s Day, which is widely regarded as a nadir for everyone involved, including Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, director Ivan Reitman and the band Sugar Ray. 

Veber also wrote the mind-bogglingly homophobic 1982 buddy comedy Partners but it was an original script. I did not think that I could hate that movie more than I already did but I just learned that in the original script of the film a gay hairdresser played by John Hurt with defiant dignity commits suicide because, in Veber’s words, "his life was so sad.” 

I don’t remember John Hurt’s character being particularly sad. I do remember him being gay. In Veber’s mind the two seem to be inextricably intertwined. Veber was apparently shocked that audiences actually liked a character he wrote as a mean-spirited caricature and that they didn’t want him to die. 

Bear in mind Partners is a mismatched buddy action-comedy, albeit one where Ryan O’Neal sports a joyless expression throughout that silently but unmistakably conveys how deeply uncomfortable he is, as an actor, doing anything involving homosexuality. 

O’Neal spends the film looking like a hostage being forced to read a ransom note as gunpoint. True, Veber also wrote La Cage aux Folles, which was adapted into The Birdcage but that film’s relative cultural sensitivity can be attributed to director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May and not the man who gave the world multiple versions of My Father the Hero. 

1985’s The Man With One Red Shoe isn’t as problematic as some of Veber’s worst intercontinental offenses. But it’s a perfect illustration of why some of Veber’s Gallic triumphs die unmourned deaths in the United States. 

Mr. Mom director Stan Dragoti’s remake of the Veber-co-written 1971 comedy The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe casts Tom Hanks as Richard Drew, a genial goober who finds himself at the center of an inter-agency battle between CIA big shots Burton Cooper (Dabney Coleman) and Ross (Charles Durning). 

The Man With One Red Shoe would have worked better if it was a comic take on the Hitchcockian staple of an ordinary man who finds himself trapped in an extraordinary and extraordinarily dangerous situation. 

But the film’s perversely, albeit purposefully passive protagonist is anything but a relatable everyman. Richard is a Juliard-trained violinist who works for a classy major symphony orchestra and has women who look like Return of the Jedi-era Carrie Fisher and Lori Singer hurling themselves at him sexually. 

Lastly, Richard has the looks and charm of a young Tom Hanks. Literally no one else had that.

Hanks, fresh off his star-making turn in 1984’s Splash, doesn’t even appear until fifteen minutes in. The screenplay by Robert Klane (Weekend at Bernie’s, Weekend at Bernie’s 2) spends that time establishing the meaningless conflict between two CIA veterans it’s impossible to care about. 

Dragoti has frustratingly assembled a murderer’s row of great character actors that includes, in addition to aforementioned Durning and Coleman Edward Herrman as Brown, Coleman’s second in command, David Ogden Stiers, Tom Noonan, Gerrit Graham, David L. Lander, Art LeFleur, Julius J. “Sho Nuff” Carry and James Belushi as a man being cuckolded by a young Tom Hanks. 

The film disastrously casts extremely distinctive character actors with lots of personality in interchangeable roles whose defining characteristic is that they don’t have any personality at all. They have sunglasses, suits and scowls where their souls should be. Why cast actors as different and amazing as Graham and Noonan if you’re only going to have them play the same thin caricature of a CIA professional? 

Belushi’s Morris is a wacky professional percussionist married to Fisher’s Paula. Paula is desperate to continue a sexual relationship with Richard, who is understandably a little conflicted about boning his co-worker and the wife of a good friend. 

Through circumstances far too stupid to go into, Morris hears a recording of Richard banging his betrothed booming out of a fake ambulance owned by the CIA and thinks that it’s live sound of her fucking some dude in the back of an ambulance. 

Belushi, weirdly enough, makes for a more relatable everyman than Hanks. It’s certainly easier to root for a guy whose wife is having sex with his good friend than it is to root for a creep who is making the beast with two backs with his buddy’s ball and chain. 

Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. The film’s plot involves Burton Cooper, the Deputy Director of the CIA, trying to humiliate Durning’s Director of the CIA into resigning by running a drug smuggling operation that leads to the high-profile arrest of a CIA agent in Morocco.

The savvy veteran spook decides to get revenge on his adversary by purposefully leaking a rumor that a man will be arriving at an airport who will be able to clear Director Ross of any blame from the Morocco incident. 

Richard Drew is chosen at random by Brown because of the peculiarity referenced in the title. Burton becomes convinced that the violinist is a master spy of supreme importance so he seemingly dedicates half of the CIA’s resources to tailing him. 

Everything Richard does is analyzed through the prism of his supposed genius as an undercover agent. When he goes to the dentist Burton Cooper and his flunkies suspect that he’s having a microchip inserted into his tooth. When he flushes a toilet repeatedly, meanwhile, the CIA thinks that he’s hiding something important and send a poor agent into the sewers to try to retrieve it. 

The frustrated CIA agents can’t figure out Richard’s secret because he has no secret. There are no layers to peel back. He’s just a guy. 

The problem with making a movie about a CIA operation that is a pointless waste of time, money and energy and serves no useful purpose whatsoever is that if you’re not extremely careful and extremely artful, it will lead to a motion picture experience that is also a pointless waste of time, money and energy and serves no useful purpose whatsoever. 

That’s The Man With One Red Shoe in a nutshell. It’s a strained, unfunny spy comedy that wastes a remarkable cast and the young Tom Hanks. 

Hanks bumbles obliviously through the film, unaware that his ho-hum little life has become a hot potato between warring factions of the CIA. He has nothing to do and not much of a character to play. 

The Man With One Red Shoe is consequently an unfortunate illustration of the limits of boyish charm. No one could save a project this limp and lifeless. 

If I were to write this movie up for My World of Flops it would be deemed a Failure, the saddest and least impressive rating.

All this measly little sub-mediocrity wants to do is make people laugh. It could not fail harder on that level. The Man With One Red Shoe did not make me laugh even a single time and that’s the whole point of featherweight nonsense like this.