Hanky Panky

One of the better Hitchcock spoofs, Hanky Panky (1982) is a cross-country suspense thriller comedy starring Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. It was directed by Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier, who had directed Wilder and Richard Pryor in Stir Crazy two years earlier. Wilder plays a Chicago architect named Michael Jordan (the real Michael Jordan wasn't drafted by the Bulls until 1984) visiting New York on business, where he becomes infatuated with Radner and embroiled in a vague pseudo-militaristic conspiracy at the same time. Wilder, as stand-in for Cary Grant in North By Northwest, is never quite sure which side Radner, as Eve Marie Saint, is on. Is she simply investigating her brother's murder or is she a double agent? Richard Widmark (Kiss of Death, Pickup on South Street) as "Ransom," the head of the conspiracy, will stop at nothing to retrieve the missing reel-to-reel sized computer tape. Though the New York Times called Radner "not ideally cast" for this film on June 4, 1982--no doubt they would have preferred Pryor--it was on the set that Wilder and Radner fell in love. They married two years later and lived, by all accounts, a tremendously happy life together until Radner's death in 1989. They also worked together in The Woman in Red with Kelly LeBrock (Wierd Science). Hanky Panky travels from Manhattan to Boston to Maine to the Grand Canyon, and has a fantastic scene in a secret room underneath Madison Square Garden. Watch for "Mister Magic."