by Daniel Stephens

Created on: July 29, 2009   Last Updated: November 01, 2010

Big (Penny Marshall, USA, 1988)

Dir. Penny Marshall; starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Perkins, Robert Loggia, John Heard, Jared Rushton, David Moscow, Jon Lovitz, Mercedes Ruehl

Although not chiefly a body-swap movie in the traditional sense, Big has long-since been the poster child of the genre. 1976's Freaky Friday set the idea alight with its depiction of a mother and daughter mysteriously switching bodies - the teenager having to deal with the trials and tribulations of adult life, the adult having to re-enter the rights of passage journey through school.

Penny Marshall's Big, which arrived in 1988 to practically unanimous acclaim, sees Tom Hanks wish he was an adult only to find the wish granted next day. Instead of switching bodies with another character (seen in so many great and not-so-great body-swap comedies such as Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa, and more recently 13 Going on 30, and The Hot Chick), Hanks' twelve year old Josh Baskin loses his child's body for a grown-up one. Hence, a moment of realisation involving body hair and the deep tones of a broken voice, and his mother, on his arrival downstairs for breakfast, throwing him out of the house at knifepoint believing him to be an intruder.

That leaves the young boy on the streets of New York - homeless and penniless. He finds his best friend Billy and eventually persuades him that he is trapped in this adult body by singing him a song they sang as children. Billy steals some money from his parents and helps Josh find an apartment in the city. Believing that the only way to change back into his own body is to find the fairground machine that granted his wish, Josh gets a data-entry job at MacMillan Toys while he waits for the machine to be tracked down. During the iconic scene on the giant keyboard where he plays chopsticks with MacMillan Toys' owner Robert Loggia, Josh is tasked to test new toys for the company. Suddenly, he's living the dream job of any twelve year, and moves into a huge apartment, filling it with toys, games, and a trampoline. And, with the boss singing the new employee's praises, he soon attracts the attention of Elizabeth Perkins who wants to introduce him to the side of adulthood he has yet to explore.

Big was Tom Hanks' most crowd-pleasing movie of the 1980s. It's easy to see why. It's a warm-hearted and funny movie that perfectly suited Hanks during the period. He was rightfully nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, which mixes wonderfully innocent deadpan

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