Pretty, Fast-Talking Movies that Stopped to Look Around

John Hughes' pristine legacy

I'm posting this appreciation of my favourite 1980s writer-director (which originally appeared in Arena Hommes Plus after his death in 2009), because I just watched Brats, a just-released documentary by Andrew McCarthy. It's about the young actors who, like him, frequently appeared together in 1980s Hollywood coming of age movies, many of them written and directed by Hughes. I have a few things to say about it, and the jealous New York Magazine guy that wrote the infamous 'Brat Pack' feature that ended it all. (McCarthy goes to visit him.)

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So here’s the pitch:  A Hollywood teen movie in which nothing happens. All day. In a school library. Introduced by a pretentious quote from David Bowie’s ‘Changes’. No? OK, how about this. You’re gonna love it. A boy bunks off High School to take his friends to mooch around an art gallery - to the orchestral strains of something especially delicate by The Smiths.

What do you mean you’ll call me? Don’t you want to invest your millions in these sure-fire hits??

When the writer-director John Hughes died this August, aged 59. much was made of how ‘influential’ he has been for today’s generation of movie-makers. But it’s difficult to conceive of almost any of his classic mid-80s teen films, which included Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being made in Hollywood today.

Unless you re-wrote them to include slomo amputations.

John Hughes movies had great scripts (that he wrote himself); they had instantly recognisable characters; winsome, quirky actors: all these years later young Molly Ringwald with her red hair and angsty complexion still looks to me like the prettiest, loveliest girlfriend I never had. While Emilio Estevez looks a lot like a lot of the boys I have had – at least in my mind’s eye.

Hughes movies had feelings, they had intelligence, they had heart – all of which tend to get in the way of films being made today. They also had a view of the world that, while often-times wise-crackingly cynical – "Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?" – wasn’t afraid to be lyrical. As Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) puts it, in perhaps the most famous Hughesian line (apart from ‘Anyone, anyone, Bueller.’):

‘Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop to look around, you could miss it.’

Just like, in other words, the best British pop music, with which Hughes peppered his films liberally. In fact his work, although celebrated now, often by a forty-something crowd crying over their spilt youth, looks like fragments of a lost America. A much better one than the one we ended up with – with much superior taste in pop music.

Precisely because of their humanity and wit, Many of Hughes’ movies are still as startling, twenty years on, as the Union Jack on the back of Bueller’s bedroom door, the posters on his walls for Blancmange and Cabaret Voltaire – and a glam Bryan Ferry puckering up over his bed. Matthew Broderick’s intoxicating mixture of all-American, unblinking, huckstering confidence - and Anglo, coquettish flamboyance is inconceivable in a lead Hollywood actor in a teen movie today. It would be loudly dismissed as ‘too gay!’.

The famous parade scene where he jumps on a parade float and mimes to a 1961 recording of fey Wayne Newton crooning ‘Danke Schoen’ like a Vegas Marlene Dietrich, and then to the Beatles’ deliriously, adenoidally sexy ‘Twist and Shout’ (from the previous Britpop invasion of John Hughes’ own youth) – while everyone in Hughes’ hometown of Chicago, black and white, male and female, young and old, falls in love with him, is nothing less than a dreamy pop cultural epiphany.

It was a false one, however. The future, as we now know, belonged not to sentimental, art-loving, anglophile, androgynous Ferris in a stolen red 1961 250GT Ferrari Spyder (which, quite appropriately, was actually a glass fibre fake, with a British MG sports car underneath). But rather to ruthless career-planner and Reaganite Republican Maverick in an all-American F-14 Grumman Tomcat.

Top Gun and Tom Cruise were launched into the stratosphere by steam catapult the previous year, in 1985 – the  same year as The Breakfast Club kids were chewing their fingernails and wondering, oh-so-deliciously, what they were going to do with their fucked-up lives.

Despite success with the warm adult comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), which once again spoke of a better, kinder America than the one that actually happened – one full of belly-laughs rather than today’s comedy cringe, snobbery, and sadism – Hughes’ Hollywood career didn’t quite make it into the 90s, never recovering from the frightening success of annoying kiddie comedy Home Alone in 1990, for which he wrote the script. He later left Hollywood and became a farmer. Growing things for people to eat was the perfect riposte to today’s terminally toxic movie business.

As Ferris in his dressing gown put it at the end of the credits, raising a quizzical eyebrow at us, hanging around his home: “You’re still here??  It’s over!  Go home!”

Postscript

My chum Jason alerted me to this charming and moving account of how, at the height of his success in the 1980s, Hughes found time to become a pen-pal to a 15-year-old girl smitten, like thousands of other teens, with The Breakfast Club. He turns out to have been everything his exquisitely human and funny movies made us want to believe he was:

“I can’t tell you how much I like your comments about my movies. Nor can I tell you how helpful they are to me for future projects. I listen. Not to Hollywood. I listen to you. I make these movies for you. Really. No lie. There’s a difference I think you understand.”

“You’ve already received more letters from me than any living relative of mine has received to date. Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn’t as painful as I portray it. Believe in yourself. Think about the future once a day and keep doing what you’re doing. Because I’m impressed. My regards to the family. Don’t let a day pass without a kind thought about them.”