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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 9/20/2025

John Hughes

Pop culture voices that are intimately tied to a particular generation are common enough, but those with cultural staying power well past their prime moment are rare. John Hughes is one of those, I think. A writer/director/producer who became famous for writing and directing a small series of films about teenagers and Gen-X, Hughes captured the voice, anti-authoritarianism, and general desire to make something of oneself by one's own rules perhaps better than anyone else trying it through the 1980s.

Now, I come to the filmography of John Hughes with surprisingly little previous exposure. I'm a Millennial, and I was about six years old when Hughes released his final, directed feature, Curly Sue. My parents aren't Gen-X, and the only Hughes movie I had access to growing up with, of all things, Weird Science. I ended up seeing Ferris Bueller's Day Off more than once through high school, but aside from those two, I was unexposed to Hughes until now. I'd never seen Sixteen Candles. I had seen snippets of The Breakfast Club on television. I think I saw Uncle Buck once on television when I was about thirteen, so I come to this with fresh eyes.

And what did I find? I found a writer/director/producer who had a real voice, who could write realistic sounding teenaged characters, who was shockingly goofy, and whose dance of writing, directing, and editing was a dance on the edge of a knife, a dance that could only last so long before he fell off.

Beginnings

John Hughes will always be known first and foremost as a writer for two main reasons. The first is that his directed films don't have the kind of screamingly obvious directorial stamp that people can easily point to (this usually hinges on visual design). The second is that his writing career extended to before he started directing and continued for more than a decade after he stopped. One of his most famous films, Home Alone, is just a script he wrote and Chris Columbus directed.

So, it was something of a surprise to find that in Sixteen Candles I found a writer who seemed deeply unsure of his own writing. At least, that was how I saw it at the time. I had believed beforehand that the film would be saccharine and earnest (I asked Dolley, my wife, what her impression of the film would be, a film she's never seen, and she agreed with my preconceived notion), but what I got was goofy and, to a small degree, earnest. Sixteen Candles is this weird, funny film about growing up that completely embraces random, goofy humor, especially around the foreign exchange student played by 80s Japanese stalwart Genne Watanabe.

When contrasted with The Breakfast Club, a more sedate and focused film that does, of course, have its own share of reduced goofiness, it makes Sixteen Candles feel like an aberration, an attempt by Hughes to take an idea and distract from it to make sure that people are entertained for the whole 90-minute runtime. That may have been part of the equation, but as Hughes' career went on, I kept seeing this dance between the goofy and the earnest, the balance getting better as he went.

Balance


I think that balance he found between goofy fun and earnest, character-based storytelling is one of the keys to his longevity. He's serious enough to write solid characters, but he's not so serious as to lose sight of trying to have a good time. It's easy to point out examples, but I think the best overall example will be Ferris Bueller's Day Off, mostly because his two main characters represent the two sides of this coin.

Those two characters are the eponymous Ferris and his best friend Cameron. Ferris is a fantasy (there's a running theory that he's just a creation of Cameron's psyche to try and break out of his rut). He's a freewheeling fun guy who gets away with everything and has almost mythical adventures running around Chicago. Cameron, by contrast, is wracked with self-doubt stemming from an overbearing relationship with his father. Cameron is actually the main character in the film, the one with the arc, the one who grows and changes. Ferris, on the other hand, is the protagonist, driving the plot forward through his actions and decisions, almost all of which are outrageous breakings of norms for teenagers in the 80s. It's a contrast that is entirely designed by Hughes.

He's balancing actual storytelling around growing up and saying goodbye to childhood, as exemplified through dialogue by Ferris late in the film while Cameron goes catatonic, with his goofy sense of humor like when Ferris climbs a float in the middle of a parade and gets everyone to sing "Danke Schoen" with him. And that balance is what gives the film greater popular life. You get the character stuff that makes people care about the characters, but Hughes is light on his feet about it. He wants to make you laugh in between making you feel, and that's the kind of combination that works with wider audiences.

Falling off the Edge


Hughes transferred his comic and dramatic sensibilities towards the middle-aged experience in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, inspired by his own attempt to get home over the course of several days once, and he was at the top of the world. Every single film he'd made was profitable from the $1 million investment in The Breakfast Club that made $50 million at the box office to the $15 million investment in Planes that made about another $50 million. He'd built up his career first making stars like Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson to using existing stars like Steve Martin and John Candy.

He'd produced all but two of his films (his first, Sixteen Candles, and Weird Science, which he took to get Universal to fund The Breakfast Club), and he produced his follow up to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, She's Having a Baby. Costing $30 million, it's a romantic comedy about a young couple who...eventually have a baby.

And it bombed horribly. It made $16 million at the box office. It received some of the worst critical notices of his career (it's hard to pull contemporary consensus from movies released 40 years ago, so I have to rely on certain flashpoints like Siskel and Ebert or the New York Times). It was a real knockback for a man who'd seen nothing but success since he'd started directing, and I think it has everything to do with that delicate balance he had been managing since Sixteen Candles. That dance of goofy humor and earnest character that made his best films. She's Having a Baby tries that, but it just falls over.

The center is gone. The emotional core gets so obfuscated by silly nonsense spread out over a longer stretch of time (most of Hughes' films take place over very defined and short periods while She's Having a Baby takes place over about 4-5 years) that nothing really connects. The eponymous baby-making doesn't actually start until about 80 minutes into the film, so it's this story of a newly married couple navigating a host of early relationship problems, constantly undercut (not buoyed like in Ferris or Planes) by goofy comedy. He leans far more into the comedy, but he didn't have the stronger emotional base to build on because his focus was too diffuse. That delicate dance on the knife's edge faltered.

Three Times


There's a truism in filmmaking that movies are written three times: on the page, on set, and in the editing room. I don't think I've found a filmmaker where that's more obviously true than John Hughes.

There are stories around his writing process, writing first drafts in 2-3 days and then rewriting for dozens of more drafts. There are stories of encouraging improvisation on set from his actors. And there are stories of workprints being more than twice as long as the final product and including large sections never seen in the final version (fantasy sequences in The Breakfast Club, for instance). And I get this sense from those stories and the actual final products that Hughes' process was something that was always on the verge of flying completely out of control, that losing sight of one side of things would overbalance the other side and make a final product that no longer knew its own center. That's exactly what I feel like came to dominate Hughes' final three films from She's Having a Baby to Uncle Buck to the worst offender Curly Sue.

Now, just to clarify, I don't dislike Uncle Buck, I just don't think the balance of comedy and drama works as well as it should. I think a lot of that is the casting of John Candy who's too nice and good at the beginning to sell a genuine change of character the film wants by the end. However, it's the other two films where that balance is so obviously out of whack.

Having already talked about She's Having a Baby, let's focus on Curly Sue. There's a massive casting problem here in the form of Jim Belushi, a largely unlikeable lead who can't act very well, which undermines a lot. However, the problem here is that Hughes was reaching outside his comfort zone and trying to make a slapstick comedy in the vein of Bringing Up Baby, and the nature of a slapstick comedy is more rigidly defined and witty rather than random and goofy. The humor really doesn't land, and the drama is undermined by its male lead's mere existence. It's one of those films where things just don't work at a level for a filmmaker who should know better that it makes one question how it even came together.

The Magic Sauce


And that makes me think that Hughes didn't quite understand his own end products. He knew what he liked, but he never quite figured out why other people liked them. Given as much unlimited power as possible in the industry after Sixteen Candles, he flourished. Nothing changed for him, only his ability to command larger budgets and hire bigger names, he peaked with Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and then he immediately floundered. Nothing really changed. She's Having a Baby was just another movie he was writing himself, producing himself, and directing himself. Except for Kevin Smith (who calls it his favorite Hughes film), no one seems to have particularly warm feelings about it. It's not an example of a film just missing contemporary audiences and actually being worthwhile. It's just an outright miss from someone who'd only hit.

And it feels so potent because he only made two more films, one of which (Curly Sue) is easily considered his worst by consensus, before he simply stopped directing. Curly Sue came out in 1991. John Candy died in 1994, and Hughes credited Candy's death with eliminating his desire to direct films. He continued to write (movies like Beethoven) and produce until 2002 when he retired. I suspect part of the reasoning for his retiring from directing was because of the sudden loss in success. Two of his three final films being outright bombs (Uncle Buck, despite my reservations, made the most money of any of his films, but the other two did not), and the less enthusiastic critical receptions probably combined with Candy's death to sap Hughes' desire to go to set every day (directing is not an easy job).

And I find it unfortunate because if there was a filmmaker with an authoritative voice in the studio system in the 80s, it was John Hughes. He had talent. He made funny films. I just don't think he quite understood why his best films came together like they did. It really was a magical formula on some level, an end product of a whirling, unbounded, and freewheeling process with so many inputs over so long a time. It's no wonder that it could end up something like a mystery to the guy in the middle of it who was just pushing goofy, earnest things and meeting nothing but success for a time.

Still, that's not to demean his first five films at all (and Uncle Buck to a lesser degree). They're well made. They're well written. They're funny. They're touching. Some, especially Ferris, The Breakfast Club, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles have surprising cultural purchase roughly forty years after their original release.

That's not small, at all.

Hughes was a special talent. I can't imagine his movies working as well as they do with a tighter writing, production, and editing process, though. What he made was unique and special, even if it burned too bright and too quickly.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Him

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Sixteen Candles (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I mostly liked it when Dong got drunk, I think." [Amazon Prime]

The Breakfast Club (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "The caricatures reveal real characters through confrontation and conversation and even a quick adventure through the halls to get some pot from Bender's locker. It's an accomplishment of writing and performance without a weak actor in the bunch, Hughes getting the most out of a limited set and focused timeframe." [Library]

Weird Science (Rating 3/4) Full Review It's just a loose film with a fun concept that everyone seemed to have a good time while making. I get a kick out of it, but it really is minor fun that needs good spacing between viewings." [Kanopy]

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Rating 4/4) Full Review "I do think this is the pinnacle of what John Hughes was trying to do with his cinema: a story about teenagers looking out towards an uncertain future and trying to make sense of themselves." [Library]

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Hughes' process was obviously messy, a poster child for the saying that films are written three times (on the page, on set, and in the edit), but they could work really, really well." [Library]

She's Having a Baby (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I wouldn't go so far as to call She's Having a Baby a disaster. There's too much mildly entertaining dotted throughout. But this is definitely a huge step down for him." [Personal Collection]

Uncle Buck (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's unfortunate because I think the return to a focused timeline (two or three days), the anchor of Candy's performance, and a tighter narrative approach actually helped Hughes after the diffuse experience that was She's Having a Baby. I just don't think he landed quite as well as he should have." [Amazon Prime]

Curly Sue (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Curly Sue is a bad place for him to stop, but I suppose it's better than him having directed Baby's Day Out himself." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 10/11, and it will be about the directing career of James Whale.