Ha ha and best of Thanksgivings to my
Yankee Doodle friends! Yes, here for you is one of the quintessential American
Turkey Day movies, Planes, Trains &
Automobiles, which has no particular holiday resonance for me, being
Canadian as I am, but is a perfectly enjoyable picture simply on its own
merits! I like it better than Uncle Buck, anyway, ha ha!
Anyway, a viewer looking for Canadian
content need look no further than John Candy, who alone provides a great deal
of content, ha ha! This beloved comedy star, admired for his appearances in
pictures like Summer Rental and Armed and Dangerous, and of course that
other holiday classic The Silent Partner,
plays shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith, who travels around hawking his
wares and making friends everywhere he goes! Meanwhile, uptight Chicago ad man
Neal Page, in New York for a presentation, wants to get back to Chi-town to be
with his picture-perfect family for the holiday! Neal is played by silver-domed
Steve Martin, famed for roles in All of Me and ¡Three Amigos!
This picture is the story of their
trouble-filled journey from Wichita, where foul weather forces them to land, to
Chicago, and of course there are many delightful happenings along the way, and
strong performances from both Martin and Candy! Ha ha, in fact, I think this
may be Candy’s best work! Alongside the delights there are plenty of patented
John Hughes moves, like the ascension of minor inconvenience to high tragedy
when the victim is a white upper middle-class fellow; the absolute fealty to
bourgeois family ritual; sudden sledgehammer blows of sentiment; and the use of horror movie tropes like musical stings
and oblique cinematography to introduce working class characters, who are
supposed to be naturally terrifying, I guess, unless they’re founts of wisdom
like Carl the janitor in The Breakfast
Club! Ha ha!
It’s a two man show for the most part, but
Hughes sprinkles in plenty of cameos and familiar character faces! Kevin Bacon,
well known for his appearance in Friday the 13th, shows up as a young businessman trying to get the same
cab as Neal; Michael McKean from D.A.R.Y.L.
turns up near the end as a highway patrolman; Larry Hankin from Escape From Alcatraz is Doobie the cabbie; Richard Herd from Summer Rental and Gary Riley
from Summer School are in there too, along with plenty of others! There are even
familiar voices, like that of Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who is an unseen bus
driver here, and was one of the old boys in the blues bar in Weird Science!
Anyway, we all know the story and we all
know the jokes, and probably most people feel Planes, Trains & Automobiles is as much a comfy blanket to put
on in a cold season as it is a movie! Ha ha! But it raises a lot of questions,
too - things that are maybe explained by the rumoured four-and-a-half hour
original cut, ha ha! I wonder if that wouldn’t have been a bit much? Anyway, I
wonder how it works out after the concluding freeze frame on John Candy’s face:
did Del stay for Thanksgiving dinner? Did the in-laws all accept him? Where did
he go after that? Who paid for the destroyed rental car? Ha ha, I give editor Paul Hirsch a lot of credit for putting
it all together and leaving room for all the comedy smash cuts Hughes was so
fond of!
Well, it’s a solid little picture, not beloved by
me, but I admit it has a comfy feeling to it! I saw it at the theatre, maybe on
not exactly a date but one of those little co-ed gang outings that sometimes
happened! Ha ha, I saw The Breakfast Club
that way, too, which was apt! In any case, it gave me a fondness for both these
Hughes works that I might not have otherwise, and so I give Planes, Trains & Automobiles two and
a half pillows!
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