Tawny Kittaen

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2021) Considering Tom Hanks’ persona as America’s everyman, universally loved and respected and so on, it’s occasionally good to go back to the first phase of his film career and take a look at the kind of stuff he was starring in as a younger man. Oh, there’s plenty of broad sentimental material here — Splash, Big, The Man with One Red Shoe, Turner & Hooch, etc. —but then there’s some more interesting material in there and I’m not sure there’s anything more surprising than seeing Hanks leading a raunchy sex comedy in Bachelor Party. Not that raunchy of a sex comedy, mind you: Despite the promise of a wild sex-and-drugs-fuelled bachelor party and the ominous presence of a donkey (don’t worry), the film flirts with naughtiness more than commits to it, all the while building up a committed relationship between our baby-faced Hanks protagonist and his fiancée (Tawny Kittaen, in fine form) on the eve of their wedding. There are clichés and dumb jokes that wouldn’t pass muster today (including as hysterical a case of transphobia that could be put on film in a 1980s comedy, which is a lot) and they do harm to the film. But the rest of it is strong enough, in a somewhat conventional way that tips its hat to the classic 1980s comedy slobs-versus-snobs archetype. Still, the most interesting aspect of Bachelor Party to a twenty-first century audience may be the spectacle of Tom Hanks partying it up wildly in between strippers, donkeys, drunken Asian gentlemen and a trashed hotel suite. I’m not sure we’ll ever see something like that again in his filmography…