The Money Pit

Yes, it’s Richard Benjamin’s 1986 comedy, starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long.

And look at this supporting cast: Josh Mostel, Joe Mantegna, Philip Bosco, Maureen Stapleton, Yakov Smirnoff, Mary Louise Wilson, Mike Starr (much younger and lighter), Jake Steinfeld (before he became known only as “Body By Jake”), Frankie Faison and, somewhere in there, invisible, Michael Jeter (that’s Mr. Noodles’ brother Mr. Noodles, for those of you who are preschoolers).

But most strikingly, Alexander Godunov as Tom Hanks’s romantic foil.

Yes, Tom Hanks and Alexander Godunov fight over Shelley Long. Now that’s ’80s.

Alexander Godunov: star of the Bolshoi, when he retired he came to Hollywood and, like his friend Barishnakov, decided, what the heck, to become a movie star. Why not?

He had a near-wordless part in Peter Weir’s Witness as, yes, Harrison Ford’s romantic foil. Alexander Godunov and Harrison Ford fight over Kelly McGillis. If only they knew.

For The Money Pit, Godunov decided “Well, I’ve proven that my image actually registers on film. Why not try comedy?” And you know, he really gets it. He really understands that comedy means bugging your eyes and exaggerating your line readings.

Or maybe he was directed to do those things. Because that’s what everyone in the movie does. Only problem is that Godunov does it while also trying to wrap fizzy lingo-centric comedy lines around his thick Russian accent.

What’s the problem? Russians are funny people. Why can’t they have him say things a Russian might say?

He made one more Hollywood movie, 1988’s classic Die Hard, where he menaces Bruce Willis, back to almost wordlessness.

By 1995, he was dead from acute alcohol syndrome.

A lot of things don’t work in this movie. There’s some over-produced physical comedy of the 1941 variety, which kind of comes out of nowhere. There’s some real comedy about the hazards that beset any couple trying to fix up an old house, which promises development but ends up toothless, and then, in act III, a romantic storm kind of whips up out of nowhere. Scene by scene the movie is perfectly enjoyable. Put all together, it doesn’t really add up.

The screenplay is from David Giler, who earlier wrote the searing, violent Walter Hill picture Southern Comfort and later wrote James Cameron’s Aliens.

Well, that’s the life of the screenwriter.

This souffle was shot by none other than Gordon Willis, certainly the greatest DP of his generation. That might explain the occasional artsiness of the compositions. Willis worked lighter than this (his work on Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is some of the best of his career), but it doesn’t come to much this time around.