I have loved John Hughes' films all of my life. When I was 7 years old I rigged up Rube Goldberg machines in the living room trying to be Macauley Culkin in Home Alone. When I was in high school I skipped school and karaoked "Twist and Shout" like Ferris Bueller (though I was probably more like Cameron Frye). My family watches Planes, Trains and Automobiles everything Thanksgiving. In recent years, as my tastes have developed, and as I continue to watch Hughes' films, I have come to notice that, although his subject matter was somewhat unextraordinary (the suburban upper middle class American experience), and he worked within the confines of commercial Hollywood, Hughes very much demonstrated the qualities of an "auteur," and his films are strewn with clues revealing the man's sophisticated artistic ambitions and tastes.
Hughes is an important link between Mike Nichols' pioneering use of Simon and Garfunkel in The Graduate to today's soundtrack cinema of Wes and P.T. Anderson. Hughes' soundtracks are eclectic, to say the least, as much mixtapes as accompanyment for a film, loaded with everything from Oingo Boingo and Kajagoogoo to Patsy Cline and obscure R&B gems from the 50s. He was never indulgent with his soundtracks though, always matching the character, the mood, with the song. In Uncle Buck John Candy, an old school Chicago guy complete with cigar and porkpie hat, barrels around in his broken down bomber of a Caddy to the rolling beats of Big Joe Turner and LaVern Baker. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Matthew Broderick models himself philosophically on the teachings of the Beatles, and could easily be described, using Timothy Leary's famous description of the Beatles, as a "laughing freeman" (I am sure Hughes casting of Broderick had something to do with his not faint resemblance to a young Paul McCartney). Bueller, however, like Hughes, is not simply a casual Beatles fan. "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me," Ferris quotes, a lyric, not from a Beatles song, but one of Lennon's controversial solo singles, "God". Bueller is also obsessed with the Wayne Newton song "Danke Schoen" and later, in one of the most joyful sequences in cinema, performs it on a double bill with "Twist and Shout". It was rare for a Hughes film not to feature a memorable musical sequence: Who could forget John Candy playing keys on the dash to Ray Charles' "Mess Around?" The "chica-chic-ahh" of Yello's "Oh Yeah"? Anthony Michael Hall talking shop with old bluesmen in Weird Science? Perhaps Hughes' only musical misstep was the atrocious score for Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which comes close to ruining an otherwise brilliant film.
Hughes, not surprisingly, had impeccable tastes regarding actors as well. He cast Richard Edson (pictured right) of Jarmusch's hip minimalist masterpiece "Stranger Than Paradise" and the original drummer of Sonic Youth, as a garage attendant in Bueller when Edson had acted in almost no other films. The bit parts in Hughes' films were almost always infused with life, with texture, by brilliant actors. Where would Ben Stein be if not for his famous "Bueller? Bueller?" scene? No one seems to mention the other teacher in Bueller, the pontificating English teacher, but he is played by Del Close, the man who taught Bill Murray, John Belushi, Harold Ramis and countless others how to be funny at Second City. Dylan Baker was given one of his first roles as Owen ("Her first baby come out sideways. She didn't scream or nuthin'.") in Planes, Trains. Michael McKean plays a bit part as a state trooper in the same film. Hughes cast Robert Downey Jr., Bill Paxton, Steve Carrell, and Laurie Metcalf, among others, in some of their earliest film roles. Even the actors who didn't go on to bigger parts are wonderful. In a Hughes film, Edie McClurg (the red-headed receptionist with the Wisconsin accent) is a star.
In Bueller, Ed Rooney consoles Sloan Peterson for the (fake) death of her grandmother with the last line of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms: "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." Hughes was probably a Faulkner fan (Uncle Buck is the name of a character in Go Down, Moses), but this line is doubly significant because it was quoted by Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave classic Breathless. One can clearly the see the influence of Godard's Pierrot Le Fou vibrant color scheme on Bueller, particularly in the close-up shots of the Ferrari, as red as a firetruck, and the blue of the shot with Bueller and Sloan kissing in front of the stained glass window. Undoubtedly, Hughes was a fan of Truffaut, as the two men shared a tender affection towards adolescence and their depictions of the rigors of school are perhaps unmatched in cinema. Hughes was also interested in theatre (he spoke of turning The Breakfast Club into a stage play; when he cast Broderick and Alan Ruck in Bueller they were appearing together on Broadway in "Biloxi Blues") and art (the art gallery from Bueller).
Where Hughes was original, where the true genius of his work lies, was in his ability to create indelible comedic archetypes out of the stuff of your average Middle American life. It is very hard to write about something like high school, about family vacations, without seeming fickle or self-indulgent, but Hughes wrote about little else. He gave us nerds and jocks, Prom Kings and Queens, teachers, secretaries, principals, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, who were real people, not just stereotypes. My favorite Hughes film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, has a comedic set-up that is so simple and elegant: an uptight ad-man (Steve Martin) trying to get home for Thanksgiving finds himself stuck on an odyssey with an annoying but loveable shower curtain ring salesman (John Candy). It is a film filled with many beautiful moments, but probably my favorite comes at the end, when Martin, on the El train finally nearing home, cycles through the memories of his misadventures with Candy and, finding something in Candy's story that doesn't add up, turns around to find him sitting alone in the train station, lonely, with no home to return to. We find out Marie, Candy's wife, has been dead for years and Martin, rather than turn his back on Candy as he has done throughout the film, offers a place for him at his family's Thanksgiving table. Together, the two men carry Candy's cumbersome trunk down Martin's suburban street towards Thanksgiving dinner, a poetic image that unites and expresses all that Hughes celebrated: family, home, friendship. Things that, upon seeing his friend and greatest collaborator John Candy worked to death by Hollywood, he willingly sacrificed his career as a filmmaker to preserve.
