Overboard (1987) Overboard (1987)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Overboard) | Backbeats (Overboard)

Quick Facts

• Director: Garry Marshall
• Screenplay: Leslie Dixon
• Starring: Goldie Hawn (Joanna Stayton / "Annie Proffitt"), Kurt Russell (Dean Proffitt), Edward Herrmann (Grant Stayton III), Katherine Helmond (Edith Mintz), Roddy McDowall (Andrew the butler), Michael G. Hagerty (Billy Pratt), Jared Rushton (Charlie), Jeffrey Wiseman (Joey), Jamie Wild (Travis), Brian Price (Greg)
• Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
• Editors: Dov Hoenig, Sonny Baskin
• Music: Alan Silvestri
• Runtime: 112 minutes
• Setting: Elk Cove, Oregon (fictional Pacific Northwest coastal town)
• Release Date: December 16, 1987 (US)
• MPAA Rating: PG
• Distributor: MGM/UA Communications Co.

Overview

A spoiled heiress falls off her yacht into the bay of a working-class Oregon timber town, washes up with no memory of who she is, and is claimed at the hospital by a carpenter she had stiffed for $600 the week before. He installs her in his ramshackle house as a wife she never was and a mother to four boys she never had, on the cover story that she has always been "Annie Proffitt" of Elk Cove. The con starts as revenge and becomes something else as the amnesiac Joanna learns to make casseroles, hammer plywood, and love the four feral boys who depend on her — while her actual husband, Grant Stayton III, sails on without her, glad to be rid of the cost. When her memory returns the question the film has been quietly asking is the only one left: which life is the real one. The 1987 Garry Marshall comedy pairs Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell at the height of their off-screen partnership and uses class swap, amnesia, and the four boys as the engine of a screwball romance about whether identity is what you were given or what you have been doing.