Nathan's Movie Collection: All of Me (1984)
"You know, it's just like a dead person to say something like that."
Note: Most of these movies have been around for a considerable amount of time, so assume there will be spoilers all throughout.
Putting together my list/schedule for “Nathan’s Movie Collection,” I tried to pick titles to broadly represent my love for specific filmmakers, performers, genres, etc. I’ve loved Steve Martin since I was a kid, so I’ve picked his 20th most popular film, All of Me.
Martin became one of my favorite actors after watching him in Father of the Bride II. In case you’re wondering, no, I had not seen the first Father of the Bride and to date, I don’t know that I have. Point is, I thought Steve Martin was the funniest man alive after watching it. Him taking the sleeping pills and immediately falling over was a scene I would rewatch into perpetuity. I eventually got to The Jerk and Planes, Trains, & Automobiles but for a while, Steve Martin falling face down onto a dining room table was his highest comedic achievement.
When I moved back to the states in 2008, one of the first things I bought with my own money was a CD of A Wild and Crazy Guy. The following summer, I worked a valet parking job where I spent a lot of time driving all over St. Louis to restaurants, clubs, private events, etc. and this was the album running in my car on almost every drive. The moment he became my comedy hero was when I realized he was purposely doing visual bits to screw with people listening to the record, which probably set me the path to finding guys like Tim & Eric.
When my brother and I were teens and old enough to maneuver on our own through Puebla, the city we were living in at the time, we would go to the Blockbuster five minutes away from our house with our parent’s membership card. After Father of the Bride II, I checked out a couple of Steve Martin movies1 and All of Me was one of them. All I gathered from reading the case was that Lily Tomlin takes over Steve Martin’s body and that’s all I needed to know. I was already fan of Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator character, something I talked about in the Nashville post2, so I imagined the movie would be the Telephone Operator annoying Steve Martin for an entire feature-length film. It’s not quite that, but it’s still something special to watch.
Steve Martin is probably the funniest person to watch get stymied over and over in a film, so it makes sense to put him in a body-swap comedy. He plays Roger Cobb, a lawyer who plays the jazz guitar in his free time. He’s married to the boss’ daughter and angling to get The Big Promotion. The firm he works for is handling the estate of Edwina Cutwater (Tomlin), a dying, eccentric millionairess who plans on transferring her soul to Terry (Victoria Tenant), a younger woman so she can finally experience life having spent her entire life bedridden. After Edwina dies and her soul is transferred to bowl, the bowl then falls out of a window and hits Roger. Instead of Terry, Edwina's now inside of Roger, controlling the right side of his body and he the left. This is where the movie hooked me, watching Steve Martin silly walk into the building after being possessed by the spirit of Lily Tomlin.
Of all the Steve Martin movies I watched as a kid, I always thought it was weird that this is the one I was compelled by the most. As I’ve rewatched it over the years, it comes down to the bathroom scene. A lot of the more adult humor (“Yeah, well I faked mine too!”) went completely over my head. “The little firemen” and “Big Ed” did not and it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. As a 32-year-old, I can confirm that it still very funny.
The one character that aged like milk is Prahka Lasa, the mystic Edwina hires to transfer her soul. Whatever stereotype you’re thinking he embodies, it’s all of them. Aside from him speaking essentially gibberish, there’s a bit where he thinks flushing the toilet in his hotel room is making the phone ring. I can’t remember what I thought of it the first few times I watched it, but now it’s just painfully unfunny and goes on longer than needed. If I had my druthers (and a time machine, and some way to be involved in the production of the film All of Me), those scenes would be taken out. And that makes me a good person (visual component: I am currently patting myself on the back).
Lily Tomlin partially controlling Steve Martin’s body is where the magic is. Literally. It’s a perplexing situation to everyone but Tyrone (Jason Bernard), Roger’s blind friend and fellow jazz musician. Of all the characters in the movie, Tyrone accepts the reality of the situation pretty quickly.
ROGER: I really don’t think I could explain it.
TYRONE: What’s wrong, Roger?
ROGER: Well, Edwina died today. Her soul entered me and took over the right half of my body.
TYRONE: Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?
Later on, when they try to get Edwina’s soul back into Terry, it ends up in Tyrone. Jason Bernard has to do the same kind of acting then that Steve Martin’s been doing the whole movie and he kills it, down to all the little physical movements. When Lily Tomlin isn’t speaking or in a mirror of some kind, which is the only way we see her throughout the movie, it’s on Steve Martin, and Jason Bernard for a little bit, to sell the physicality of it all.
By the end of the movie, we’ve found out Terry is a crook trying to scam Edwina3. Rather than go to prison, she has her soul transferred into a horse and Edwina is put into Terry’s body, as was the original plan. By this time, Roger and Edwina have gone from enemies to lovers so the ending credits roll over the two dancing to the song the movie is named after. Then it ends with my favorite shot of the movie: it starts with Steve Martin and Victoria Tennant4 dancing before panning around to the mirror that shows Martin and Tomlin dancing as the credits roll.
As far as I know, this is the only time Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin worked together. There should’ve been more, honestly. Both of them have enough range that they could’ve done different genres but I would’ve been just as happy if it were just a long series of body-swap comedies. You know, they’re actually both still around and working pretty regularly so I’m gonna quit writing now so I can throw a screenplay together. For now, enjoy the closing credits for All of Me.
I don’t believe Steve Martin was as popular in Mexico because it was a pretty small selection. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels were the other ones, I think. I asked the clerk if they had Three Amigos and he said, “Oh, I’ve got way more than three.” This is very funny if you imagine the conversation happening in Spanish.
On that same SiriusXM classic comedy station, I heard Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing “The 2000 Year Old Man.” It would take me a few years to figure out that Reiner was also a director of such films as All of Me.
Roger calls it during his first scene with them, though it doesn’t stop him from trying to sleep with Terry later in the movie.
Martin and Tennant for a couple for several years after this movie. I don’t have anything smart to add, just seemed like an interesting fact. As you were.