Today’s quick review: The Woman in Red. Theodore Pierce (Gene Wilder), an ad executive and family man, contemplates cheating for the first time when he meets Charlotte (Kelly LeBrock), the model for one of his ad campaigns. Theodore moves heaven and earth to land a date with Charlotte and keep it a secret from his wife Didi (Judith Ivey). But as the complications mount, he begins to wonder whether all the trouble is worth it.
The Woman in Red is a comedy about a man trying and failing to cheat on his wife. Smitten with Charlotte, Theodore wraps himself in a web of lies to keep his hoped-for affair a secret. The Woman in Red’s humor is tied closely to Gene wilder. As Theodore, Wilder is flustered, distracted, and prone to spur-of-the-moment decisions that inevitably land him in trouble. His performance is enough to carry the movie but is held back by a mediocre plot.
The Woman in Red has some fine individual jokes but has a hard time building on them. Nearly all of the jokes are variations on the same theme, so the movie ends up retreading the same ground, with Theodore making incremental progress with Charlotte and landing himself in new untenable situations. To the movie’s credit, it surrounds Theodore with a well-developed supporting cast, but it is still stuck with a linear main plot.
How much you get out of The Woman in Red will come down to how much you like Gene Wilder. The premise sets up the jokes and Wilder delivers them, but the movie never gets beyond the same basic ideas. As such, anyone who doesn’t like Wilder’s humor for its own sake may find the movie repetitive and a little shallow. Give it a shot when you are in the mood for something light and a little silly.
Check out A Guide for the Married Man or Last of the Red Hot Lovers for two other comedic takes on attempted infidelity. For a more outrageous use of Gene Wilder, try Young Frankenstein or Robin Hood: Men in Tights. For a more nuanced comedy about an affair, try The Graduate.
[6.0 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088414/). I give it a 6.0 to 6.5 for decent humor without the scaffolding to support it.