Blind Date (1987 film)

Blind Date is a 1987 American romantic comedy film directed by Blake Edwards and starring Bruce Willis (in his first credited lead role) and Kim Basinger. Blind Date earned mostly negative reviews from critics, but was a financial success and opened at number one at the box office.

Plot
Career-focused workaholic Walter Davis is under pressure to deliver on a major project that will see his employers manage the vast assets of Japanese industrialist Yakamoto. Urgently needing a date for the dinner celebrating the deal, Walter's brother Ted offers him a blind date with his wife Susie's cousin Nadia. Ted and Susie warn Walter not to let Nadia get drunk as she loses control.

Walter meets Nadia, finding her beautiful, sweet, and charming, but her obsessive ex-boyfriend David attacks Walter out of jealousy. After evading David, Walter takes Nadia to a recording studio to listen to his friend play guitar. David tells Nadia that he gave up his dreams of being an aspiring musician for the security of a steady job. Despite the warnings, he gives Nadia some champagne to relax. At the celebratory dinner with Yakamoto, Nadia quickly loses her inhibitions and begins acting impulsively, calling out Walter's colleague for attempting to seduce her, mocking a waiter for his condescending attitude, and inadvertently spraying Walter's boss with champagne. Her actions draw the ire of Yakamoto who expects women to be quiet and subservient. After Nadia convinces Yakamoto's meek wife to divorce him and take half his assets, the deal with Walter's employer collapses and he is fired.

After leaving the dinner, David repeatedly stalks and attacks Walter in vain attempts to reunite with Nadia. Upset at the encounters, Nadia asks Walter to stop the car so she can use a bathroom but she runs off to a disco. Walter follows and the pair reconcile while dancing together. David again finds them and instigates a bar brawl, during which Walter and Nadia escape. Nadia requests to be taken to a friend's party but Walter insists on taking her to her accommodation. Arriving at the address Nadia provides, the house is towed away on the back of a truck, Walter's car is stripped of parts while he is distracted, and he is accosted by muggers. They conceal a gun inside his car and flee when the police arrive who force the panicked Walter to undertake a sobriety test. Nadia sobers up and expresses regret for her actions before David returns; Walter rams David's car off the road. Manic from the night's events, Walter insists on taking Nadia to the party, where he embarasses her with his dishevelled appearance as he excessively drinks alcohol, plays with the food, and trips a waiter into the pool. David arrives and fights Walter until the latter finds the gun. He threatens David but the police arrive and arrest the bloody and bruised Walter.

The following morning, Nadia bails Walter out of jail. Walter tells Nadia that he never wants to see her again but Nadia reminds Walter that he gave her alcohol despite being warned. She laments that she thought he was someone with whom she could fall in love, having initially found him sweet and generous. Feeling guilty about the trouble she caused Walter and the years of imprisonment he faces, Nadia asks David, a defense lawyer, to represent him. David accepts in exchange for Nadia agreeing to marry him, to her disgust. David is despised by his father, Judge Harold Bedford, who agrees to declare Walter innocent if David relocates his life as far away as possible.

Susie gives Walter a note from Nadia in which she says she will miss him and asks that he start playing the guitar again. Walter injects a box of chocolates with brandy and sends them to Nadia at David's parents' mansion, where the wedding will take place. Nadia unwittingly eats the alcoholic chocolates, becomes inebriated, and disrupts the wedding, refusing to marry David because she is in love with someone else. Walter interrupts the event and kisses Nadia, to the attendees' joy and David's ire.

Sometime later, Walter and Nadia honeymoon on a beach. He plays the guitar for her while a celebratory bottle of Coca-Cola chills in a champagne bucket.

Production
The film was originally intended for the recently married Madonna and Sean Penn, but both backed out after the project failed to attract a director. The project moved from Handmade Films to Blake Edwards, who agreed to direct contingent on script changes. The studio agreed and the movie was re-cast with Willis and Basinger.

Billy Vera & The Beaters appear in the bar scene, playing several songs.

Box office
Blind Date was released in the United States and Canada on March 27, 1987. During its opening weekend it grossed a total of $7.5million from 1,251 theaters—an average of $6,020 per theater—making it the highest grossing film of the weekend, ahead of Lethal Weapon ($5million), in its 4th weekend of release, and Platoon ($3.9million), in its fifteenth. In its second weekend, Blind Date fell to the number 2 position with a $5.7million gross, placing it behind the debuting Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol ($8.5million) and ahead of Platoon ($4.7million). It fell to the number 3 position in its third weekend with a $4.1million gross, behind Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol ($4.5million) and the debuting The Secret of My Success ($7.8million). Blind Date left the top-ten highest-grossing films after ten weeks.

In total, Blind Date grossed $39.3million, making it the 23rd-highest-grossing film of 1987 in the US and Canada.

Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 24%, based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 4.60/10. The website's consensus reads, "Blind Date has all the ingredients for a successful madcap comedy, but the end results suggest director Blake Edwards has lost his once-reliable touch." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four and wrote: "There are individual moments in this movie that are as funny as anything Edwards has ever done, but they're mostly sight gags and don't grow out of the characters. The characters, alas, are the problem. Willis plays a nerd so successfully that he fades into the shrubbery and never really makes us care about his fate. Basinger, so ravishing in most of her movies, looks dowdy this time. Her hair is always in her eyes, and her eyes are her best feature. [...] Most of the time I wasn't laughing. But when I was laughing, I was genuinely laughing - there are some absolutely inspired moments." Variety calls it "essentially a running string of gags with snippets of catchy dialog in-between".

Soundtrack
The soundtrack to the motion picture was released by Rhino Records in 1987.


 * Track listing
 * 1) "Simply Meant to Be" - Gary Morris & Jennifer Warnes
 * 2) "Let You Get Away" - Billy Vera & The Beaters
 * 3) "Oh, What a Nite" - Billy Vera & The Beaters
 * 4) "Anybody Seen Her?" - Billy Vera & The Beaters
 * 5) "Talked About Lover" - Keith L'Neire
 * 6) "Crash, Bang, Boom" - Hubert Tubbs
 * 7) "Something for Nash" - Henry Mancini
 * 8) "Treasures" - Stanley Jordan
 * 9) "Simply Meant to Be" (Instrumental) - Henry Mancini