The Remarkable Rob Reiner: Films That Define the Filmmaker

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest directorial debuts in film history, Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984). Unarguably the funniest film about music and musicians ever made, it is also arguably the finest film about music and musicians ever made because, amid all the unforgettable one-liners and set-pieces, it featured probably the best—indeed, perhaps the only good—hair-metal songs ever written.

And yet Spinal Tap was just the start of a remarkable opening run of films by Reiner that lasted for the rest of the 1980s and into the start of the 1990s, which jumped genres from mockumentary to romantic comedy to fantasy to horror.

Since then, no Hollywood director has come close to matching Reiner’s astonishing opening salvo of films. Even the great Greta Gerwig has so far only completed three back-to-back classics or near-classics with Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), and Barbie (2023), so she is only halfway towards reaching the milestone that Reiner achieved in making five of his first six films superb

Scripts from this Article

This is Spinal Tap

Stand by Me

The Princess Bride

When Harry Met Sally…

Misery

This is Spinal Tap (1984)

Screenplay by: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner

A 2022 British Film Institute article, Rob Reiner: How We Made This is Spinal Tap, lovingly and hilariously detailed the long gestation of the original and greatest “mockumentary” (even if Reiner’s Martin Scorsese-alike alias “Marty Di Bergi” called it a “rockumentary”). The film slowly but beautifully evolved from skits and sketches for various TV shows that Christopher Guest and the other stars of the film had developed since the late 1970s, which Reiner then marshaled into a whip-smart spearing of utter stupidity.

Spinal Tap was so instantly successful and has proved so enduringly successful that it has dwarfed the influence of its source of inspiration, Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz (1978), which is about The Band’s last gig. Spinal Tap continues to dwarf any other comedy about music and musicians that has been made since, with the possible exception of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), a pastiche of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005).

Four decades on, Spinal Tap is as sharp, accurate, and, above all else, funny, and one can only hope that the sequel that Reiner, Guest, and the other Tappers are working on is even half as funny as the original.

Read More: Sonic Stories: The Cinematic Magic of Movies About Music

Stand By Me (1986)

Screenplay by: Raynold Gideon, Bruce A. Evans, and Stephen King

Leonard Cohen once said that a great band or great artist meets your every need, and that is certainly true of one of the greatest and most commercially successful writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Stephen King.

King is universally known for his “horrorverse,” but he has also written several great non-horror stories or stories where the horror is realistic and believable rather than fantastical and ultimately unbelievable. Alongside the sublime The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which was directed by Frank Darabont, the two finest non-horror (or believable horror) King films were both directed by Reiner.

The first was Stand By Me, which is one of the great coming-of-age films precisely because it shows how horrific it can be to “come of age” and leave childhood behind. Supposedly inspired by one of King’s childhood memories (although a former friend of his, George McLeod, has claimed that King plagiarized the idea from one of his stories), Stand By Me captures all the conflicting feelings of adolescence—excitement, fear, etc.—as four young boys set off to find the body of another young boy who is missing, presumed dead.

But of course, as in all the best stories, including those by King, their external search ultimately leads them inwards into themselves, and the chilling realization that their childhood won’t last forever.

The Princess Bride (1987)

Screenplay by: William Goldman

In this remarkable opening run of films, Reiner switched genres and indeed subject matter as easily—indeed, as seemingly effortlessly—as Howard Hawks had at his best half a century earlier. If Spinal Tap was all about the “sights, sounds, and even the smells of a hard-working rock band,” The Princess Bride (1987) was altogether lighter, sunnier, and more fantastical.

It showed how Reiner, who was born into Hollywood royalty as the son of Carl Reiner and who then starred as a young actor in the hit US sitcom All In The Family (1971-1979), appeared able to encompass the entirety of American film and screen storytelling in the first few movies that he made.

The Princess Bride was adapted for the screen from the fantasy novel by William Goldman, one of the most successful screenwriters of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Princess Bride was Goldman’s finest screen adaptation of his own prose, and, as he had always done throughout his directorial career up to this point, Reiner found the perfect directorial touch for it.

Read More: The 50 Greatest Screenwriters of All Time

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

Screenplay by: Nora Ephron

Reiner’s second film, The Sure Thing (1985), can be considered as a dry run for a far superior rom-com. Five years into his directorial career, Reiner made another completely different classic to match Spinal Tap, namely When Harry Met Sally (1989), which is probably the last truly great romantic comedy of the 20th century and arguably the last truly great “rom-com” ever made. Indeed, it may just be the ultimate “rom-com” because it focused on the conflict that lies at the core of any romantic comedy or indeed any romantic relationship: can lovers also be friends, or vice versa, or are the two states—friendship and love—completely distinct and mutually contradictory?

Written by Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally was an enormous box-office success, by far the biggest of Reiner’s career to that point, but it was largely critically dismissed as a Woody Allen rip-off or even “Woody Allen-lite” when it was first released. However, having been written by a woman, When Harry Met Sally is a far more balanced analysis of “the battle of the sexes” than anything that Allen, for all his genius, ever wrote.

Misery (1990)

Screenplay by: William Goldman and Stephen King

Reiner’s early films were uniformly good, if not great,because great writers penned their scripts.From Spinal Tap onward, which represents the most complete realization of Guest’s comic genius, Reiner valued great writing. This appreciation may stem from his father Carl’s legacy; Carl was a gifted writer who contributed material to numerous TV shows and films throughout his extensive career. Misery (1990) was the logical corollary of all that great writing: a film written by a great screenwriter (Goldman), based on a novel by a great writer (King) that was itself about a writer.

Indeed, Misery is one of the best films ever made about writers and writing. It starred James Caan in what was probably his greatest film role since The Godfather (1972) nearly 20 years earlier (with the possible exception of Michael Mann’s Thief (1981)), as a romantic novelist who finds himself imprisoned after a car crash by a woman who describes herself as his biggest fan.

Consequently, Misery is a masterpiece about what writing means, both to writers and their readers. Famed for what is possibly, with all due respect to David Cronenberg, the finest example of “body horror” ever committed to film, Misery is much more than that famous set-piece, showing how writers dream of fame but are usually fatally unprepared for all its consequences.

Read More: The Most Gripping Thriller Movies: Can You Handle the Suspense?

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Sadly, Reiner himself could not maintain his amazing opening run. Having made five fine films in just five years at the start of his directing career, he has never made a film since that is really worthy of comparison.

Nevertheless, such is the enduring quality of his early films that they are still worth celebrating today, at least until the arrival of Spinal Tap II, which might unfortunately be yet another not-so-funny sequel to a truly great comedy film à la Anchorman 2 (2013), reduces Reiner’s remaining critical stock even further.