The last – and best – of the four films that comedian Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner made together (it was preceded by The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and The Man with Two Brains (1983), all with their fair share of fantasy elements) is a showcase for Martin’s superlative physical clowning but is also packed with genuinely funny one-liners and likable characters. It runs out steam a little towards the end, perhaps, but when it’s powering through the early absurdities at full pelt, it’s irresistible. Martin himself later commented that “my mature film career started with All of Me and ends with L.A. Story” which seems a very summation.

Martin does fine work with a stock character that could have been grating but ends up very relatable, dissatisfied attorney and part-time jazz guitarist Roger Cobb (a character of the same name turned up played by William Katt the following year in House (1985) but there’s no connection between the two) who’s suffering a mid-life crisis (he’s only 38 but men suffered these crises much younger in the 80s…) He’s seeing Peggy (Madolyn Smith), the daughter of his boss, Burton Schuyler (Dana Elcar) and is finding little satisfaction in either a relationship that he can’t fully commit to or a job that’s going nowhere. All that seems to change when Schuyler hires Cobb to defend him in his imminent divorce and simultaneously assigns him to the case of eccentric millionairess Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin), bedridden since childhood and deeply unpleasant to all those around her. She seems less interested in Cobb looking after her estate than in some hare-brained new age scheme in which she hopes that mystic Prahka Lasa (Richard Libertini) will transmigrate her soul into the body of the young beautiful Terry Hoskins (Victoria Tennant). Cobb is dismissive of the idea – until an accident leaves Edwina trapped in his body, she in charge one side, he in charge of the other…

All of Me seems of a piece with a slew of identity crisis comedies that were around at the time – films like Tootsie (1982), Victor/Victoria (1982) and Yentl (1983) – but is far more overtly fantastical than any of them. It seems at times less concerned with some of the gender issues raised in the other films (though Edwina’s fascination with her new male body is milked for all every possible gag by writers Henry Olek and Phil Alden Robinson, adapting Edwin Davis’ unpublished novel Me Too) but has much fun skewering certain “new age” beliefs. But really it’s a vehicle for Martin’s extraordinary physical comedy and he was rarely quite as physical as this elsewhere. The extended scene where Edwina first ends up in Cobb’s body is a tour-de-force as Cobb struggles to retain control of his body while freaking out passers-by with his apparently one-sided conversation. It’s a brilliant piece of work, one of the finest bits of slapstick performance you’ll ever see.

The rest of the cast are rather left in Martin’s shadow. Tomlin is terrific of course, reduced to only appearing in reflections once Edwina is dead, but still managing to make something of the role. Edwina is a thoroughly unlikable person when alive but becomes a much warmer and more lovable character as death exposes her insecurities and fears and allows her to express them for the first time. Tomlin also gets some very funny lines so that even if she’s off-screen, her comedy presence is never that far away. Elsewhere, Tennant (she and Martin would marry in 1986) is marginally less wooden than usual, Jason Bernard really should have been given more to as Cobb’s blind saxophonist friend Tyrone (what little he has to do is often very funny indeed) and Libertini is having a whale of a time as the constantly confused fish-out-of-water Tibetan guru.

The riotous silliness of the first half of the film, a throwback to the classic screwball comedies of the 1940s, isn’t quite maintained through the second half which tends to meander and get bogged down with distractions like Schuyler’s divorce hearing, but even these lesser moments are affable enough if never quite hitting the comedy heights of the first act. The ending is what you’d expect, though there’s a bit of business involving a horse that’s very good indeed, but predictability is probably baked into this sort of thing – no romantic comedy, at least not one hoping to succeed at the box office, is going to end on a tragic note. But when it gets things right – the chemistry between the two leads, the one-liners (“How dare you say penis to a dead person!”, ” if I can be of any help at all, you are in worse trouble than I thought”) and above all Martin’s astonishing performance – it’s as good as any American comedy from the 1980s.

It’s appeal has waxed and waned over the years it feels, but there’s enough residual love for it to prompt Dreamworks to announce a remake in 2012 which seems to have dropped off everyone’s radars. In the meantime, Martin went on to enjoy a career peak in films like Three Amigos (1986), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Roxanne (1987), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and L.A. Story (1991); Tomlin would appear opposite Bette Midler in Big Business (1988) and was one of the huge ensemble cast assembled by Robert Altman for Short Cuts (1993); while Reiner directed several more films before his death in 2020, none of them were as outstanding as the quartet he made with Martin, a working relationship that seemed to bring out the very best in both of them.