Romancing the Stone (1984)

 

Romancing the Stone is a great hybrid of romantic comedy and action-adventure film. It’s a sexy film with lots of gunfire, some physical comedy, and even a few crocodiles. It also marked the first movie pairing of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas (with Danny DeVito along for the ride, as usual). They would later appear together in The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses, but Romancing the Stone set a template for their future film interactions. They don’t like or even trust each other at first, but they begin to fall in love, and the film is as much about their relationship as it is the outline of the major plot. Turner plays Joan Wilder, a romance novelist living a pretty dull life with her cat. She’s not having any actual adventures; she just writes about them. Douglas is an actual adventurer, the perfectly named Jack Dalton, who smuggles exotic birds; he’s making his way through the jungle, one small town or village at a time. When Joan’s sister is kidnapped and taken to Colombia by the hapless brothers Ira (Zack Norman) and Ralph (DeVito), she crosses paths with Jack and attempts to enlist his help in rescuing her sister. She has to promise to pay him what she has left in traveler’s cheques once they’re both stranded in the jungle. Throughout the film, there’s a clear example of a McGuffin (one of Hitchcock’s favorite devices) in this treasure map to the location of a large emerald called El Corazon (“The Heart”), but really what matters here is the interaction between Turner and Douglas. It’s somewhat incidental that the map came from her murdered brother-in-law, and now everyone, including another drug lord named Col. Zolo, keeps looking for Turner because she’s in possession of it. Turner is very sexy here, and she becomes looser as the movie progresses and her inhibitions around Douglas’s Jack lower. She’s so delightful when she finds one of her fans in a small village, a local drug lord named Juan who helps them escape capture. Douglas, by comparison, was always a bit of a lech in his movies during this period. A look at his facial expressions seems to tell you his intentions with Joan. And that raises one of the central concerns of the film’s narrative: Does he love her, or is he just an opportunist? Has he started to have feelings for her, or does he just want to find the treasure of El Corazon himself? Romancing the Stone likes to tease viewers with the nature of their relationship, and it’s a delight to watch them bicker ruthlessly and then enjoy each other’s company.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing