Blind Date (1987)

Blind Date arrives from 1987 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing. Blake Edwards directs Bruce Willis in his first credited leading role, and the machinery is pure farce: a workaholic, a beautiful woman who cannot metabolize champagne, an obsessive ex-boyfriend, and a business dinner that detonates on schedule. The studio had originally wanted Madonna and Sean Penn, which tells us something about the era's ambitions, though not much about this film's.

On the matter of social consciousness, the pickings are thin and mostly accidental. The dinner sequence involves a Japanese industrialist named Yakamoto whose function is to embody the assumption that women should be quiet and subservient, a caricature the film presents without a flicker of self-awareness; his wife is meek, silent, and available as a punchline. Nadia does urge her to divorce him and take half his assets, which registers as a gag about marital arithmetic, not a statement of principle. The film's actual comic engine is a woman losing her inhibitions to alcohol, and it treats that as an inexhaustible resource. Walter's confession that he traded his guitar for a steady paycheck gestures at something, but the collapsed deal is plot mechanics, and the story has no interest in the corporation beyond its usefulness as a source of humiliation. There is no environmental concern, no neurological framing for Nadia's behavior, no body politics, no historical revision, and no LGBTQ+ presence of any kind. The sermonizing, such as it is, amounts to the observation that a man should perhaps respect the warnings he is given.

None of this is a failing. It is simply a document of its moment, a gag delivery system with a Mancini score and a Coca-Cola in the champagne bucket. The film opened at number one and has been largely forgotten. The classification is straightforward.