Rob Reiner’s film, adapted by screenwriters Raynold Gideon and Bruce Evans from Stephen King’s novella The Body, transformed King’s story into a glorious, mainstream American classic like something by Mark Twain. The film was released in 1986; since 1993 its added poignancy had resided in the fact that one of its actors, River Phoenix, died of a drug overdose. But now there is a terrible new layer of sadness superimposed on the film’s themes of innocence and death: the murder in 2025 of Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner.
One hot summer day in the late 50s, remembered in flashback with narrative voiceover, four boys go on what amounts to a secret, secular pilgrimage in search of the corpse of a missing kid their own age rumoured to lie next to some distant railway tracks, having been hit by a train. The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama.
