Director: Penny Marshall
Cast: Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Robert Loggia, John Heard
Have I Seen it Before: If I had to rank the top 10 VHS tapes played in my house in the years before DVD broadened all of our cinematic horizons, I’m reasonably sure this one would make the list.
Did I Like It: It’s a charmed comedy that can play just as well when I was kid than when I was middle-aged adult. The thrill of the fantasy of waking up one morning and all of the restrictions of childhood are gone might have terrified some, but it thrilled me. I was the opposite of Peter Pan, and so any world where my life had to suddenly halt in favor of a supposedly immediate need to take out the trash, or—God forbid—a world where I could be grounded was an enticing one indeed.
Now, the thought of living a world where room and board are a foregone conclusion, where a pittance of a paycheck can suddenly become a fortune, and all the communication you need with the outside world is a walkie talkie and somebody with a corresponding handset just next door does have a certain simplicity to it.
Is that the secret to the film’s longjevity? Probably, it’s hard to discount the profound well-cast Hanks in the title role. Legend has it that Robert De Niro was set to play Josh Baskin, but backed out at the last moment. That’s a pretty great endorsement for De Niro’s sense of what ought to work and what has no right working whatsoever. While David Moscow—the young Josh—might be just a hair more believable as an outer-borough kid that will eventually become De Niro, there are few—if any—actors at that point in time who would have been better suited than Hanks to play a twelve-year-old trapped in the body of an adult.