Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

In Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond one’s years, artistically inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic and hopelessly misunderstood. These characters weren’t so much role models—they were far too flawed—as they were imaginary friends for the audience, who empathized with every pang of adolescent longing. Within a couple of years, it seemed, every teen-movie protagonist had an Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and every real-life teen had a crush on Molly Ringwald.

And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing “neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie” and “poozer” and “eat my shorts” into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind. While he prepared to direct Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matthew Broderick’s nearly superhuman Ferris a fitting culmination of the steadily increasing confidence held by Mr. Hughes’ characters), he hammered out the script for Pretty in Pink and turned it over to rookie director Howard Deutch. Judging by Mr. Deutch’s commentary on Paramount’s new DVD edition, he was simply Mr. Hughes’ proxy and conceded in nearly every disagreement.

The result was the first in what would be a series of films written and produced, but not directed, by Mr. Hughes and superficially bearing his marks. But despite the familiar sans serif titles and NME-approved soundtracks, these films lacked his sharp visual sense and, most tragically, a handle on the rhythms of his dialogue.

Pretty in Pink is a hodgepodge of teen-romance archetypes. Working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) falls for rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Super-rich slimeball Steff (James Spader), having been rejected by Andie, tries to convince Blane that she’s “trash.” Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, but she has no romantic feelings for him. Gee, maybe it’s the logorrhea? Or the mirrored round sunglasses? Or the way he practically stalks her?

If it’s hard to imagine dating Duckie, it’s even harder to swoon for the craven Blane, who reneges on taking Andie to the prom, then unconvincingly drops the L-bomb. The script originally called for Andie to wind up with Duckie, but test audiences balked and Mr. Deutch, to Mr. Hughes’ chagrin, reshot the ending. (The footage of the original ending promised on the DVD packaging is nowhere to be found.)

Everything that doesn’t hinge on the main plot works. Mr. Spader, with his Mitchum-heavy lids and dangling cigarettes, is the most magnetic—and, in fact, it’s the characters on the margins who are most interesting. Harry Dean Stanton lends weight to the role of Andie’s layabout single dad, while Annie Potts as Iona, the manager of the record store that Andie works at, fits the moody music she plays. And despite Duckie’s insufferability, Mr. Cryer gives a wonderful, brave performance, especially in his hold-nothing-back lip-synching of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

A year after Pretty in Pink, Mr. Hughes got the ending he wanted with Some Kind of Wonderful. Enter gender reversal: Eric Stoltz played the lower-class Keith (once again, the opening sequences reveal the poor kid to literally live on the other side of the tracks), with Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts, the best friend who’s in love with him, and Lea Thompson as Amanda, the girl for whom he pines. But Hardy (Craig Sheffer), Amanda’s rich ex-boyfriend, wants to quash it.

Mr. Hughes and Mr. Deutch wisely lay the groundwork of a first kiss between Keith and Watts, and their outcast friendship is less one-sided than that of Andie and Duckie, all of which points to an ending that improves on Pretty in Pink’s. But a bizarre third act has Keith unloading his college fund on a mega-date with Amanda, which includes squandering his savings on a pair of diamond earrings, a move that’s supposed to symbolize—well, it’s not really clear. And so John Ashton, as Keith’s apoplectic father, is the sole voice of reason in the final 20 minutes (presumably not the intent of the maniacally antiauthoritarian Mr. Hughes, who in interviews has scoffed about a college education); then the credits roll, and the Hughes teen oeuvre comes to an unsatisfying close. (The defeated filmmakers would soon collaborate on The Great Outdoors.)

And yet even these second-tier films, treating adolescence with gravity and sensitivity, mesmerized a nation of kids. The emotional moments in teenage life in which the heart races fastest—a first kiss, the seconds before a confession, the nausea of jealousy—should seem overblown to an adult viewer, but the films’ openheartedness is powerful enough to recall painful buried memories.

Ironically, it might be teens today who would scoff at such fumbling intensity. Fifteen minutes into Pretty in Pink, Blane predicts the future of teenage social life. From across the high-school library, he hijacks Andie’s computer screen with a simple message: “Do you want to talk?” Decades later, millions would follow in his footsteps with MySpace and instant-messaging, and a generation would know diaries as something to be shared.

What Pretty in Pink doesn’t predict so well is the future of the teen film. Though Mr. Hughes’ influence is apparent in commercial failures like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, the lure of today’s dramas has quickly moved from identification toward purely aspiration. The O.C. (tag line: “It’s nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine”) abandoned class issues early on in favor of debating the niceties of Chrismukkah; then Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County dispensed with authority figures altogether; while the Duff sisters play the Hilton sisters in Material Girls.

How can anyone possibly see his or her own life reflected in this? It’s only natural that we’d be flummoxed. The Pretty in Pink fans of 1986 are long past the teenage experience, decades older but not yet raising teenagers of their own. Better to just let it go. As Andie warns the 32-year-old Iona in Pretty in Pink, “You’re gonna OD on nostalgia.”

In Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond one’s years, artistically inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic and hopelessly misunderstood. These characters weren’t so much role models—they were far too flawed—as they were imaginary friends for the audience, who empathized with every pang of adolescent longing. Within a couple of years, it seemed, every teen-movie protagonist had an Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and every real-life teen had a crush on Molly Ringwald.

And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing “neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie” and “poozer” and “eat my shorts” into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind. While he prepared to direct Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Matthew Broderick’s nearly superhuman Ferris a fitting culmination of the steadily increasing confidence held by Mr. Hughes’ characters), he hammered out the script for Pretty in Pink and turned it over to rookie director Howard Deutch. Judging by Mr. Deutch’s commentary on Paramount’s new DVD edition, he was simply Mr. Hughes’ proxy and conceded in nearly every disagreement.

The result was the first in what would be a series of films written and produced, but not directed, by Mr. Hughes and superficially bearing his marks. But despite the familiar sans serif titles and NME-approved soundtracks, these films lacked his sharp visual sense and, most tragically, a handle on the rhythms of his dialogue.

Pretty in Pink is a hodgepodge of teen-romance archetypes. Working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) falls for rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Super-rich slimeball Steff (James Spader), having been rejected by Andie, tries to convince Blane that she’s “trash.” Meanwhile, Andie’s best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer) pines for her, but she has no romantic feelings for him. Gee, maybe it’s the logorrhea? Or the mirrored round sunglasses? Or the way he practically stalks her?

If it’s hard to imagine dating Duckie, it’s even harder to swoon for the craven Blane, who reneges on taking Andie to the prom, then unconvincingly drops the L-bomb. The script originally called for Andie to wind up with Duckie, but test audiences balked and Mr. Deutch, to Mr. Hughes’ chagrin, reshot the ending. (The footage of the original ending promised on the DVD packaging is nowhere to be found.)

Everything that doesn’t hinge on the main plot works. Mr. Spader, with his Mitchum-heavy lids and dangling cigarettes, is the most magnetic—and, in fact, it’s the characters on the margins who are most interesting. Harry Dean Stanton lends weight to the role of Andie’s layabout single dad, while Annie Potts as Iona, the manager of the record store that Andie works at, fits the moody music she plays. And despite Duckie’s insufferability, Mr. Cryer gives a wonderful, brave performance, especially in his hold-nothing-back lip-synching of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.”

A year after Pretty in Pink, Mr. Hughes got the ending he wanted with Some Kind of Wonderful. Enter gender reversal: Eric Stoltz played the lower-class Keith (once again, the opening sequences reveal the poor kid to literally live on the other side of the tracks), with Mary Stuart Masterson as Watts, the best friend who’s in love with him, and Lea Thompson as Amanda, the girl for whom he pines. But Hardy (Craig Sheffer), Amanda’s rich ex-boyfriend, wants to quash it.

Mr. Hughes and Mr. Deutch wisely lay the groundwork of a first kiss between Keith and Watts, and their outcast friendship is less one-sided than that of Andie and Duckie, all of which points to an ending that improves on Pretty in Pink’s. But a bizarre third act has Keith unloading his college fund on a mega-date with Amanda, which includes squandering his savings on a pair of diamond earrings, a move that’s supposed to symbolize—well, it’s not really clear. And so John Ashton, as Keith’s apoplectic father, is the sole voice of reason in the final 20 minutes (presumably not the intent of the maniacally antiauthoritarian Mr. Hughes, who in interviews has scoffed about a college education); then the credits roll, and the Hughes teen oeuvre comes to an unsatisfying close. (The defeated filmmakers would soon collaborate on The Great Outdoors.)

And yet even these second-tier films, treating adolescence with gravity and sensitivity, mesmerized a nation of kids. The emotional moments in teenage life in which the heart races fastest—a first kiss, the seconds before a confession, the nausea of jealousy—should seem overblown to an adult viewer, but the films’ openheartedness is powerful enough to recall painful buried memories.

Ironically, it might be teens today who would scoff at such fumbling intensity. Fifteen minutes into Pretty in Pink, Blane predicts the future of teenage social life. From across the high-school library, he hijacks Andie’s computer screen with a simple message: “Do you want to talk?” Decades later, millions would follow in his footsteps with MySpace and instant-messaging, and a generation would know diaries as something to be shared.

What Pretty in Pink doesn’t predict so well is the future of the teen film. Though Mr. Hughes’ influence is apparent in commercial failures like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, the lure of today’s dramas has quickly moved from identification toward purely aspiration. The O.C. (tag line: “It’s nothing like where you live. And nothing like you imagine”) abandoned class issues early on in favor of debating the niceties of Chrismukkah; then Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County dispensed with authority figures altogether; while the Duff sisters play the Hilton sisters in Material Girls.

How can anyone possibly see his or her own life reflected in this? It’s only natural that we’d be flummoxed. The Pretty in Pink fans of 1986 are long past the teenage experience, decades older but not yet raising teenagers of their own. Better to just let it go. As Andie warns the 32-year-old Iona in Pretty in Pink, “You’re gonna OD on nostalgia.”

While the others in that list are recognized classics, Two for the Road (out this week from Fox Home Entertainment) has generally been regarded as a lightweight charmer. On the surface, it is the stuff of traditional drama: The 10-year marriage of Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) Wallace is recalled, in flashbacks of the couple’s past trips through the French countryside. Mark is an architect, and his chief patron has summoned him to finalize a house; this miserable present-day work trip (Joanna has accompanied him) serves as the film’s through-line conflict. Is their marriage over? This voyage also acts as a springboard for associative digressions into memories of their first meeting, of their lean newlywed years, of their nightmarish double-date vacation with another couple. The Time article, while praising the “juggling of chronology,” dismissed it as “otherwise an ordinary Audrey Hepburn vehicle.”

Two for the Road is absolutely defined by its chronological structure, in which the vignettes of a lifetime alternate at an increasingly rapid rate, each memory informing all subsequent ones. A characteristic sequence: The just-met couple looks through a café window and sees a husband and wife arguing. Unable to hear the argument, they amuse themselves by guessing the source of conflict. We hear Mark’s voice, then Joanna’s voice, synched to the older couple’s gesticulating, as though they’re putting words in their mouths. And then we realize that they’re no longer pretending—the camera returns to Mark and Joanna, years later, having their own fight. As they walk out of view, a red sports car passes and then roars into the next scene—this time driven by Mark, on his way to a tryst years later. A love letter to Joanna is read over the scene of the tryst, and as he begins his solo trip home, the letter concludes, and Joanna and their young daughter Caroline are suddenly in the car. Joanna offers Mark some of Caroline’s ice cream; he refuses. Then the couple is walking together, Joanna feeding Mark an ice-cream cone, on their first trip. It’s a heartbreaking fugue in which experience corrupts innocence in all of three minutes.

Of course, this wasn’t the first film to investigate the way memory haunts lovers. The works of Alain Resnais ( Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad) are perhaps the most famously anamnestic in cinema, but Two for the Road had a close precedent, Claude Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and a Woman, in which a couple’s budding romance is interlaced with each lover’s recollections of their late spouses.

A Man and a Woman made $6 million in the U.S., won two Oscars, and paved the way for Two for the Road (it may not be a coincidence that veteran French editor Madeleine Gug was brought on board to cut the film). Screenwriter Frederic Raphael approached Donen after John Schlesinger had deemed the idea “too difficult”; it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker making the material as accessible as Donen does. He tempers the caustic script with beautiful photography and a charmingly melancholy Henry Mancini score. Even as he plays with jump cuts and mid-zoom freeze frames, Donen does his part to normalize the experience. Whereas Resnais’ jumbles disorient the viewer, Two for the Road carefully coaxes us into its rhythms—slowly at first, eventually mixing time frames for only seconds at a time.

As a map, we’re given Audrey Hepburn’s varying hairstyles and costumes, and year-specific automobiles. Those cars are temporal clues, but in a movie that never shows the characters’ homes, they’re also the sets—and part of a trend that escaped Time’s notice. In the same year that Jean-Luc Godard’s camera spent 10 minutes tracking toward the gruesome source of a French traffic jam in Weekend, several Hollywood films revealed the centrality of the automobile within modern life, as each cinematic set-piece seemed to come assigned with its own memorable make and model: Dustin Hoffman escorting Mrs. Robinson home in an Alfa Romeo Duetto ( The Graduate); Lee Marvin’s ecstatically destructive test drive of a Chrysler Imperial ( Point Blank); and Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s elongated demise in a Ford 730 V8 Deluxe Sedan ( Bonnie and Clyde).

Upping the ante, Two for the Road makes the cars subtle thematic signposts. Mark and Joanna start out with the spontaneity of a green MG TD, are held prisoner by another couple’s staid Ford station wagon, and cruise luxuriantly but solemnly in a white Mercedes 230. (The red sports car that Mark drives to his extramarital conquest is, of course, a Triumph.)

In the end, a vehicle is just a vehicle—except when it’s an Audrey Hepburn vehicle. She swears, bares skin and generally loosens up more than we’re used to, and if there remains what Henry Mancini called “Audrey’s quality of wistfulness—a kind of slight sadness,” her persevering Joanna ameliorates the sullenness of Mr. Finney’s Mark. The warmth between Hepburn and Mr. Finney keeps the bantering couple from becoming a mere symbol of crabby matrimony.

Their repartee is in the DNA of both their arguments and their romance, from flirtatiously antagonistic courtship to tin-anniversary cruelty, blurring that thin line between love and hate. After repeated viewings, the audience shares with them a persistence of memory that bleeds between and informs abutting time frames; as with memory, there is no longer a neat lineage of events. If the older couple keeps intruding on the younger couple—in passing cars, at the café window—it’s the romance of the younger that sustains the older. The film is not, as it seems at first, a post-mortem determining of how things went wrong, but simply a flood of memories every bit as confusing as true, exhausted love.

When Moonlighting premiered in March 1985, the actors were hardly selling points. Thirty-five-year-old Cybill Shepard had gone into hiding following the debacles of Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975) (in The Last Picture Show (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976), she'd essayed convincing, if routine, chilliness). Bruce Willis, 29, was an unknown New Yorker who'd been in a Sam Shepard play.

Instead, it was former Remington Steele writer Glenn Gordon Caron whose track record excited ABC. Mr. Caron begrudgingly agreed to do another guy/girl detective show on the condition that he could do it any way he saw fit. Quickly getting the pesky template particulars out of the way-she's an ex-model whose embezzling accountant has left her with little more than ownership of an unprofitable detective agency; he's the detective earning said unprofits-Mr. Caron set about burning the rulebook of network television. That meant rapid-fire double-tracked dialogue, Orson Welles introducing a mostly black-and-white episode, a Shakespeare parody in iambic pentameter, a dance number directed by Stanley Donen, Claymation interludes, characters turning to the audience in the middle of arguments, a Dr. Seuss tribute and even an episode in which the leads do not appear. (Only a badly timed writer's strike prevented Moonlighting from creating the first national broadcast in 3D.)

Shoving so much ambition into the staid television formulas of the time makes for a messy first season. The pilot is a Marathon Man retread; most of the subsequent cases feel like Columbo rejects. But such hackneyed constructions can be seen as olive branches offered to an audience of Airwolf and Hotel fans who might otherwise have thought this new show was a hallucination.

More distracting are the growing pains of the actors. Cybill Shepherd initially rocks what I'll call the Jerry Seinfeld Reflex-an involuntary and ever-present grin that usually befalls SNL-hosting athletes. And despite undeniable magnetism, Bruce Willis spends much of season one as the most grating hipster since Maynard G. Krebs. He repeatedly dons Wayfarers and desecrates Motown songs, mercilessly bridging the Blues Brothers and the California Raisins. The combination of her uptightness and his immaturity make for some dynamite gags, but still adds up to a lot of screeching and mugging.

And then, early in season two, everything falls into place. The not-yet-lovers begin to tease out the softness in one another and investigate each other's weekend plans. Mr. Willis finds inspiration in the strangest of places-injecting Diner-era Mickey Rourke (the whispering, the wounded smirk) and Ghostbusters-era Bill Murray (the droll sarcasm) with Three Stooges physicality. It's a delicate alchemy: Mr. Murray never could have made Maddie Hayes swoon, and the tongue-twisting dialogue would have K.O.'d Mickey Rourke in round one.

Meanwhile, Ms. Shepherd's reflexive grin is harnessed into a useful indication of suppressed adoration for her crime-solving partner, even as anger replaces the default poutiness. (Perhaps there was some Method to her mad; Ms. Shepherd claims that she and Mr. Willis had a real fight before every filmed one.) The other employees of Blue Moon, led by Allyce Beasley's compulsively rhyming secretary Miss DiPesto, provide a comedic springboard; the characters are mostly blank faces who don't have lines or backgrounds (though often they will be limboing, cheering or sighing in unison). This stock-company-as-deadpan-army is one more way in which the show succeeds in merging the screwball with the absurd.

By the time of "Twas the Episode Before Christmas," the confidence of Moonlighting is intoxicating. After an hour of sly Bible jokes, sexual innuendoes and a toy-gun shootout with Richard Belzer, snow begins to fall inside the detective agency. David and Maddie wander to the office door, walk off the set, and the entire cast and crew (and their children) begin a full two-minute a capella rendition of "The First Noël" before waving goodnight to the audience. Which is fitting: Despite the gimmicks, despite its warm pastel glow (and the occasional Robbie Neville or Starpoint music cue), Moonlighting was only interested in timelessness.

So what is the legacy of Moonlighting? Surprisingly, the genre of guy/girl detectives fell away rather than flourished; NBC's Remington Steele and CBS's Scarecrow and Mrs. King were canceled, while Moonlighting survived the fittest. (As if in eulogy to the clunky old dinosaurs he'd outlasted, Mr. Caron later wrote a Remington Steele cameo into Moonlighting; an uncredited Pierce Brosnan sportingly played along.) The movie-star action-hero persona of Mr. Willis and the vague iconicity of Ms. Shepherd have nearly eclipsed the memory of their greatest characters.

Which leaves us with Moonlighting's risk taking and rule breaking. What detective show in its right mind would feature episodes in which there was no case to solve-or allow throwaway quips about E.E. Cummings or Sylvia Plath? In an accompanying documentary, one writer sighs that all the other shows threw out jokes if it was believed only half the audience would get them; Moonlighting left them in. The true influence of Moonlighting is not cast in particulars, but rather in its belief that a television show could be as smart as those who made it, and even those they hoped might watch it.