Tom Hanks And Carrie Fisher Crossed Paths In A Forgotten '80s Comedy

It's no big secret that most of Tom Hanks' best movies are the ones he made in the '90s when he officially hit A-list leading man status. And despite a very prolific career as not only an actor but a writer, Carrie Fisher will forever be Princess Leia to the average person. So what were the two actors doing in the '80s, after Fisher first retired from space operas and before Hanks was racking up hit films and Oscar wins? They were making silly '80s movies, of course — including the one they starred in together called "The Man with One Red Shoe."

Released in 1985, "The Man with One Red Shoe" stars Hanks as a man named Richard Drew who becomes embroiled in international espionage entirely by happenstance. But the man's life is already such a complicated mess that he doesn't even notice, writing off the wild things that happen to him and the outrageous characters that come into his life as just more examples of the chaos he was already experiencing. Case in point, Paula (Fisher), who was already a wildcard presence in Richard's life as the slightly unhinged married woman that Richard hooked up with.

"The Man with One Red Shoe" wasn't well received by critics and was a box office flop, though it does sometimes find its way into discussions about and lists of the underrated movies of both Hanks and Fisher.

There is a pretty strong chance that you saw the title of this article, and — before looking at the picture, of course — automatically assumed it was going to be about "The 'Burbs." And then you were probably outraged that we implied that "The 'Burbs" is a "forgotten '80s comedy." Point of fact, one of the most recent times that we wrote about that movie, we referred to it as "Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher's classic '80s comedy," so we definitely give the film its proper reverence.

Not counting the two actors both having as-themselves cameos in the 2005 mockumentary "The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch," "The 'Burbs" is the only movie besides "The Man with One Red Shoe" that Hanks and Fisher starred together in. Fisher also gets to be a regular human being in "The 'Burbs" — well, as much as anyone is a regular human being in the movie — rather than an overexaggerated female archetype, something that she unfortunately got saddled with a bit too often in her early years as an actor. 

While only performing marginally better with critics and moviegoing audiences than "The Man with One Red Shoe" at the time, "The 'Burbs" now counts itself among comedy movies with terrible Rotten Tomatoes scores that are actually hilarious. Some would put it in cult classic territory, but we say it's just a classic, period.