by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, with Charles having one of his unusual
evenings off so we could watch a movie together, I dug through the DVD
collection and came up with the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, written and directed by John Hughes and starring
Matthew Broderick as high-school senior Ferris Bueller, who one bright sunny
morning in his home town, Chicago, in April decides he’s going to tell his
parents Tom (Lyman Ward) and Katie (Cindy Pickett) that he’s sick so he can
sneak out of the house and take a “day off” from high school, and particularly
from the all-seeing eyes of Dean Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones, who thinks he’s
Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry but
comes off more like Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles). It seems that the policy in Chicago, at least at
Shermer High School (one expects Hughes got the name of the establishment from
the similar dean character in National Lampoon’s Animal House), is that if you have 10 unexcused absences from
school, the administration can hold you back from graduating and force you to
take the senior year over again, this time “under my personal supervision,” as
Dean Rooney sententiously warns Bueller in one scene. I’d never seen Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off before and Charles had
seen it in a theatre when it was new, but not since.
In fact I’d pretty much
overlooked the entire John Hughes oeuvre when it came out, though in 1994 I bought a used copy of the Pretty
in Pink soundtrack LP and quite enjoyed it
even though I thought there was only one truly great song on it, Echo and the
Bunnymen’s “Bring On the Dancing Horses.” (I played it again earlier this
morning, courtesy of a download from iTunes, and liked a lot more of it,
including the “Pretty in Pink” song itself by the Psychedelic Furs — a favorite
of Nick and Katie, the lead characters in Francis Gideon’s novel Hopeless
Romantic, about a Gay man and the
Transwoman he falls in love with; it was reading Gideon’s novel and noting the
characters’ admiration for the John Hughes oeuvre and teen romantic comedies in general that led me to
want to re-examine it and watch this movie.) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off strikes me, 31 years later, as a truly weird movie,
ahead of its time in at least one annoying detail: there’s no one in it you
actually like. Ferris Bueller
himself is a sort of Pied Piper character able to trick or fool just about
anyone into doing whatever he wants, and though Matthew Broderick plays him
with at least a superficial charm (and is clearly better than any one of the
other discussed actors — Rob Lowe, John Cusack, Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Tom
Cruise — really? — Robert Downey,
Jr. and Michael J. Fox — would have been), the character himself quickly gets
insufferable and his ability to talk anyone into almost anything is pretty
wearing. Ferris takes his titular “day off” in the company of his sort-of
girlfriend Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara, who’s superficially charming and right
for the role but one can see why this was not a jumping point for major stardom for her) and his
sort-of buddy Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), who to me was the most interesting
character in the film, a sort of reluctant Sancho Panza to Ferris’s Don Quixote
and the one member of the dramatis personae whom John Hughes actually gave some dry wit instead
of the rather dorky jokes that supplied most of this film’s comic content.
Ferris wants Cameron to come along with him on his “day off” because Ferris,
though he has a driver’s license (or at least is able to drive, which is not
necessarily the same thing, especially in a teen movie!), doesn’t have a car. He
continually bitches about how his parents gave his sister Jeannie (Jennifer
Grey, who though she plays his sister here actually became Matthew Broderick’s
lover for a while) a car but just gave him a computer — though he uses the
computer to hack into the Shermer High database and lower his number of
recorded absences from the risky nine to a more tolerable two. (An imdb.com
“Trivia” poster noted that Broderick had previously played a hacker in WarGames, but what this scene suggested to me was that they should
have made a sequel to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which he becomes an Internet gazillionaire
running a Facebook-like company and running it like one gigantic frat party —
indeed, one can readily imagine Ferris Bueller growing up to be Mark Zuckerberg,
dropping out of a college IT program and starting an Internet giant.) What’s
most fascinating about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is that the things Ferris, Sloane and Cameron do on
their day off are quite prosaic and thoroughly wholesome — a Chicago Cubs baseball
game (in Hughes’ original script the team they went to see was Hughes’ personal
favorites, the White Sox, but he had to change it because during the time he
was filming all the White Sox home games were at night, while the Cubs remain
the one and only team in Major League Baseball who have never installed lights
in their stadium and therefore don’t play home games at night), a trip to the
Art Institute of Chicago (where Cameron has a life-changing experience staring
at Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La
Grande Jatte, also the inspiration for
Stephen Sondheim’s greatest musical, Sunday in the Park with George) and an unplanned involvement with the annual Von
Steuben Day parade in Chicago. (A number of imdb.com posters noted that the
film is supposed to take place in April — Ferris and Cameron both mention they
have only two months of high school left before they graduate — but the Steuben
Day parade, which honors a German officer who came over to fight for the U.S.
in the American Revolution and became a key assistant to George Washington in
whipping the Continental Army into a disciplined fighting force, takes place in
September, when the film was shot,
not when it supposedly takes place.)
At the Steuben Day parade Ferris takes
over one of the floats and lip-synchs to Wayne Newton’s original recording of
“Danke Schön” — a song I remember from my childhood because I couldn’t make
sense of it (I asked my mom, “What are ‘donkey chains’ and why would someone
write a song about them?”) and the Beatles’ famous cover of the Isley Brothers’
“Twist and Shout.” (I found myself wondering how on earth John Hughes got
what’s left of the Beatles’ organization to license him that record when
virtually none of the Beatles’
records are ever licensed for movies — indeed, it wasn’t until the end credits
that I was convinced it actually was
the Beatles and not a Beatles tribute band’s re-recording of the song. There’s
nothing on imdb.com about how Hughes got to use the record but there is a comment that Paul McCartney didn’t like how the
marching-band horns were heard over the Beatles’ record in the film.
Ironically, the Isley Brothers’ original version had horn parts, but they were
quite different from the ones heard here.) There’s an odd, quirky connection
between “Danke Schön” and the Beatles that deserves note: “Danke Schön” was
co-written by German bandleader and record producer Bert Kaempfert, who also
co-wrote Frank Sinatra’s hit “Strangers in the Night” and produced the Beatles’ first commercial recordings
(in Hamburg, in 1961, when they were still a five-piece: John, Paul, George,
Stu Sutcliffe on bass and Pete Best on drums). Unlike real teenagers going
through these absurd lengths to ditch school, they don’t drink alcohol, do
drugs or go anywhere sleazy; John Hughes’ original script included a scene in
which Ferris, Sloane and Cameron went to a strip club, but the film was running
over schedule and Paramount pulled the plug on the shoot before Hughes could
film it (and doubtless they were also worried about losing their PG-13 rating
and risking the film getting slapped with an R, which would have prevented much
of its target teen audience from seeing it). As au courant as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was trying to be, there’s a certain decorousness
about it as well as some gags that seem to belong more to the era of silent
comedy than the 1980’s, notably the scene in which Cameron starts kicking his
dad’s beloved Ferrari GT 120 out of jealousy that his dad loves the car more
than he loves Cameron — only, wouldn’t you know it, he eventually knocks the
car through the picture window of the room where it’s being kept (a car being kept inside a room with a picture
window? I’m not making this up, you know)
and it flies out of the room and off into a ravine, totaling it. (Paramount
received nasty letters from automobile collectors protesting that they’d
destroyed one of the only 100 Ferrari GT 120’s ever made, which they hadn’t;
since renting an actual Ferrari would have blown their budget, they built a
replica with a fiberglass body over an MG chassis.)
Indeed, one could readily
imagine a 1920’s version of this movie with Harold Lloyd as Ferris (he wouldn’t
have been that much less
believable as a high-school student than Matthew Broderick in the 1980’s!) and
Al St. John as Cameron, while there’s something Keatonesque about the elaborate
devices Ferris uses to make it seem as if he’s home sick, including a tape
recording that plays when the Bueller doorbell is rung and a synthesizer
(though some imdb.com contributors noted that in 1986 his synthesizer would
have cost $80,000, far more than the car he says he can’t afford) that makes
various coughing, belching and gurgling noises on cue and the elaborate dummy,
held in place with pulleys that move it whenever the door to his bedroom is
open, that inhabits his bed when he’s out. The gags in which Dean Rooney
crashes the Bueller home and then is confronted by their dog also are straight
out of the 1920’s, and there are other interesting bits, including Jeannie
getting herself arrested after the cops mistake her for an intruder in her own
house (the real intruder she called the cops on is Dean Rooney), and while
waiting in jail for her mom to bail her out she meets and falls in lust with an
anonymous “bad” teenage boy, played by the young Charlie Sheen, who frankly I
thought was the sexiest guy in the movie. (Given Charlie Sheen’s later history,
his one-word explanation for what he
is doing in jail — “Drugs” — is almost unbearably ironic.) Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off is an agreeable light entertainment
that could have been much more — frankly, I was hoping Hughes would have Sloane
reject Ferris and embrace Cameron as her true love at the end, which would have
been just about as clichéd as the ending we actually got but would at least
have given Ferris a bit of a well-deserved comeuppance — and I probably would
have liked this movie better and identified with it more if I’d been more of a
teen rebel myself.
I never wanted
to cut school, partly because school (academic subjects, anyway) was one of the
few things I was good at; during the scene in which the economics professor
(Ben Stein) issues his famous call of “Bueller … Bueller … Bueller” before
realizing he’s absent, then delivers a lecture about the Smoot-Hawley tariff
and periodically breaks his talk in hopes that the students will supply the
next piece of information and thereby prove they’re actually learning something
(instead they sit, stonily silent), I’d have been interrupting the teacher,
supplying all the right answers and getting myself righteously hated by my
classmates for showing off. None
of the characters in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are that likable (though I could see myself hanging
out with Cameron or maybe even being
him): Ferris himself is insufferable, the sister O.K. until Charlie Sheen turns
her “bad” at the end, Sloane the typical empty-headed heroine of these sorts of
films, Dean Rooney a caricatured villain (if he’d been made a sincere but
clueless educator who wants the kids to stay in school because he really thinks
it would be better for them, this would have been a funnier movie than it is),
and the parents of our principals all so wrapped up in their roles in the
capitalist world they barely acknowledge their kids’ existences. One of the
most interesting characters is Dean Rooney’s secretary, Grace (Edie McClurg,
who wanted to wear her hair in a 1960’s style and ended up doing it herself
because the women’s hairdresser assigned to the film didn’t know how to set
hair that way), who seems to reflect Nora Ephron’s comment about Rose Mary
Woods that she was like many long-term secretaries in Washington, D.C. who were
in love with their bosses, but in a strictly platonic way; she manages to
convey real love and respect for Dean Rooney as well as exasperation with him
over his screw-ups. With more complexity in the writing and particularly the
characterizations of the adults, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could have been a marvelous satire of capitalism and
teen angst; as it is, it’s an
agreeable entertainment but one I’d hardly assign “classic” status even though
it’s held up well enough that Paramount is still able to sell DVD’s of it three
decades later.
