If Romancing the Stone—a 1984 hybrid of Indiana Jones and classic screwball romances—holds up, it’s due to the savvy script by Diane Thomas (a novice screenwriter who tragically died a year after the film’s release). Ultimately, this isn’t about whether or not romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) saves her sister from kidnappers in Colombia and falls for a dashing adventurer (Michael Douglas) along the way. It’s about whether or not Joan can accept herself as an accomplished independent woman who doesn’t need a man. And so it’s fun to watch Turner convincingly play dippy and ditzy at the start and then grow into the sort of strong personality we normally associate with her. (The turning point? When Douglas’ Jack Colton tells her to literally get behind him and she decides to cross a rickety rope bridge over a ravine instead.) Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay. Director Robert Zemeckis, meanwhile—on the precipice of Back to the Future—undercuts the movie with a few leering shots of Turner, but mostly he brings a controlled, Looney-Tunes chaos to the proceedings. (I love the moment when Joan, trapped in a car that has crashed into a river, keeps turning the steering wheel as if it’s doing something.) With Danny DeVito as a bumbling bad guy, completely in sync with the film’s comedic, cartoon pacing.
