Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Outrageous Fortune

The buddy picture has been a staple of Hollywood almost as long as movies have existed. From Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello to Martin and Lewis and Hope and Crosby, it has been a long-standing tradition for a couple of mismatched pals to wind up in a wacky life-threatening predicament involving spies or monsters or monster spies. And if their adventures involve a cross-country or even international road trip, so much the better.

So it’s maybe a little astonishing that nobody had thought to make a buddy comedy starring women until 1987’s Outrageous Fortune. Well, maybe it’s not all that surprising. This is an industry that dismissively referred to melodramas and romances as “women’s pictures” up through the ‘60s, after all. Perhaps the delay had something to do with the subgenre’s name. Women don’t usually refer to the folks in their social circle as “buddies”. Maybe if the term “frenemy” had caught on sooner, we’d have seen something like this a lot earlier.