THE ACADEMY OF THE UNDERRATED: IT WATCHES "POPEYE"

In one of my favorite moments from Woody Allen's Manhattan, pretentious intellectual Diane Keaton and her married lover discuss "the Academy of the Overrated", an imaginary organization they have created for cultural and artistic heavy-hitters with reputations that they feel are on the inflated side. (Among the more heretical choices on their list: Carl Jung, Gustav Mahler, and Allen's beloved Ingmar Bergman.) I love the notion of such an Academy, and God knows that I could think of plenty of candidates for inclusion, in film and all other cultural endeavors. But the world is just as abundantly endowed with cultural works and creators who, for reasons of changing tastes or public ignorance or whatever, have never quite been given their due. Thus, I have decided to use my small corner of the internet to champion some of these works and artists, in the hopes that my words may coax even one person to take a fresh look at some overlooked and sometimes unfairly maligned, but eminently worthy, works of cinema and their progenitors. And so, the Movie Zombie declares the Academy of the Underrated (Cinema Division) hereby open for business.

My first inductee into the hallowed ranks of the Academy is Popeye (1980), Robert Altman's live-action iteration of the spinach-loving sailor man created by cartoonist E.C. Segar and featured for decades in newspaper comics, cartoon shorts and television specials. This film was a joint Paramount / Disney co-production, and the studios mounted the picture as their major holiday release of 1980. It was produced by Robert Evans, today lionized in a camp fashion as a Brylcreemed, slick-talking Hollywood throwback, but who was then fresh off a decade supervising (as studio head or independent producer) some of the greatest movies ever made, including Chinatown and the first two Godfather films. Altman himself was coming off of a decade that had seen him reach the heights of 1975's multiple Oscar-nominated Nashville and the lows of the critically reviled Quintet (1979), with several years of misunderstood and poorly received films to his credit; Popeye was viewed as a comeback vehicle for the director who had burst onto the scene so spectacularly ten years before with M*A*S*H. The film also boasted a screenplay by resident New Yorker wordsmith Jules Feiffer, original songs by iconoclastic tunesmith Harry Nilsson, and an eclectic cast of talented character actors and Altman regulars. Dustin Hoffman and Gilda Radner were the original choices for the roles of the brawling sea dog and his toothpick-thin lady love Olive Oyl, but the roles ultimately went to super-hot Mork & Mindy star Robin Williams (this was his first feature film lead role) and Altman repertory player Shelley Duvall.

So, with a pitch-perfect cast, a talented screenwriter, a visionary producer, and an admittedly mercurial but frequently brilliant director, the Popeye studios were perhaps right to expect an off-the-charts smash hit, especially in light of the monster grosses pulled in just two years earlier by another comic-book adaptation, Richard Donner's Superman. But the reviews for Altman's evocation of the squint-eyed sailor were harsh. Newsweek called the film "joyless", and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker declared Altman's live-action literalization of comic-book slapstick "dumb and oddly unpleasant". The film, produced for a then-considerable $23 million, went on to a worldwide gross of $60 million. Hardly a flop by any mathematical means, but considering the expectation of Superman-caliber numbers, it could only be called a disappointment which, combined with the generally scathing critical response, has sent Popeye to go down in history as a cinematic disaster and one of the worst films in the Altman canon. I am the first to admit that Popeye is probably not what most people would have expected to see when they bought a ticket to a holiday musical about their favorite greens-gobbling deckhand. For even though he was directing an adaptation of a beloved comic-strip favorite, that didn't stop Altman from turning his Popeye into (big surprise!) a Robert Altman film.

Granted, Popeye features many slapstick set pieces and crazy only-in-comics effects, just as one would expect from such a film. Altman and Feiffer were less inspired by the entertaining-but-formulaic Fleischer Brothers Popeye cartoon shorts (standard format: Bluto grabs Olive, Popeye eats spinach, Popeye clobbers Bluto, Popeye saves Olive; repeat ad infinitum) than by the more gonzo, anything-goes spirit of Segar's original Thimble Theatre strips, in which characters defy gravity with the greatest of ease and get their bodies crunched and mangled into abstract art only to pop back to normal again. Thus, the film features many lunatic moments where characters and settings undergo such forceful pummelings and pretzelizations. The first time Bluto clobbers Popeye, the sailor rolls down a dock like a barrel stave, and a few seconds later, he gets clunked on the head and twirls through a hole in the pier like a human corkscrew. In the Roughhouse Cafe, Popeye uses a rude sea salt's face as a speed bag, and when he starts to slip to the floor, Popeye picks him back up using just the centrifugal force of his whirling fists. When Bluto gets stood up by Olive at their engagement party, he literally tears the Oyls' house to pieces, and when Popeye finally gets his hands on some spinach to give Bluto what for, the arm he finally clocks the man-mountain with is the size of an ox. This film was made in the days before computer-generated special effects, so all of these wonders are practical effects created on the set, and while to some modern-trained eyes they may seem hokey and unconvincing, I found them utterly delightful, a note-perfect visualization of cartoon physics applied to the real world.

Amidst all this, Altman otherwise directs the picture in his characteristic style. His camera seems less interested in creating striking individual images than in roaming free through a fascinating world, and Popeye forsakes the static compositional style of the comics page for Altman's usual wide-ranging cinematographic style (the DP here is Fellini veteran Guiseppe Rotunno, a man with a strong background in filming carnivalesque grotesques). While Scott Bushnell's costumes are appropriately outsized and colorful (I smiled every time I saw the actors' bulbous shoes), the seaside town created by production designer Wolf Kroeger is a lopsided conglomeration of weather-beaten shacks that honestly wouldn't look out of place in a horror movie. Nilsson's songs are consistently tuneful and endearing, but there is nothing here that qualifies as a showstopping, blow-out-the-lights musical triumph, and Altman doesn't stage them as such. There's no acrobatic choreography, no kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley-style visuals. Indeed, Altman stages the numbers, well, pretty much like he stages things in all of his movies, with a restless camera catching action at all corners of the frame and with the key actions of a scene frequently occurring in the background of shots. As for Feiffer's dialogue, this is definitely not the aural equivalent of the isolated speech balloons you find on the comics page; Altman utilizes his trademarked style of overlapping dialogue so that the clamor of the cartoonish onscreen action is fully matched by the cacophony of the actors' lines crashing into and over each other. I believe that part of the reason that Popeye was so critically lambasted is because many of them may have been offended by the spectacle of a director so unwilling to subordinate himself to his material. This is not "Popeye, directed by Robert Altman". It's ROBERT ALTMAN'S Popeye, and he never lets you forget it.

Feiffer crafts a relatively simple narrative in which Popeye, searching for his long-lost pappy, washes up in Sweethaven, a ramshackle shore town whose chief industry seems to be tax collecting. The town is ruled over by the seldom-seen Commodore, who leaves the enforcing of his crippling everything-gets-taxed policies to the hulking, bearded Bluto (Paul L. Smith). Popeye "renks" a room at the Oyls' boarding house, strikes up a romance with Olive (much to Bluto's rage), and adopts Swee' Pea, a foundling in a basket who proves to have clairvoyant powers. It all climaxes with Bluto kidnapping the baby, hoping he will lead the bully to the Commodore's hidden treasure, while Popeye sets sail to rescue his Olive and the kid...while not getting chomped up by an angry-eyed octopus in the process. Story-wise, it's not enough to carry a 112-minute feature, but then, as is the case with most of Altman's films, the story is not really the engine driving Popeye. Altman is at his best with narratively loose pictures about disparate groups of individuals brought together by a common desire (as with the musical and political hopefuls that converge in Nashville) or uniting against common foes or stresses (like the beleagured Army doctors in M*A*S*H). Likewise, the seaside folk of Popeye are survivors, huddled together in a rough little burg and united by their disgust for the Commodore's taxes...and eventually, by their hope that Popeye will save the day. It's a little unorthodox for a family film, a form which generally thrives on strong, clear narrative design, but as an Altman picture, it works from a story standpoint about as well as his films ever do.

Really, the story isn't the attraction here, and there's honestly quite a lot to recommend the film. Nilsson's score provides some sweet and memorable moments, from the rousing anthem "Sweethaven" to Bluto's driving theme "I'm Mean" to the film's musical highlight, Olive's "He Needs Me", an actually quite touching ballad endearingly performed by Duvall (this song was later used to strong effect in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 Punch-Drunk Love). The moments of kooky comic book action are always impressive looking and come just frequently enough to keep the picture sparking along at a smart, enjoyable pace. The cast is spot-on perfect across the board, with a few notable standouts. Wesley Ivan Hurt (Altman's grandson) is a thoroughly adorable tyke as Swee' Pea. Paul Dooley, another Altman vet, nails Wimpy's slightly drowsy hamburger-grubbing manner, and Donald Moffat is amusingly stodgy as the Commodore's tax man. With no trace of his frequently off-putting improvisational flights of fancy, Wlliams proves why he became a movie star with this seamless evocation of the one-eyed sailor. He's got the raspy voice, the muttered imprecations and tangled syntax, and all the fleet-footed, almost balletic grace of the animated Popeye; it also helps that he's fitted out with utterly convincing cannonball-like Popeye forearms. And Duvall proves, if anyone doubted it, that she was born to play Olive Oyl, evoking the animated Olive's tangled-limbs clumsiness and fluty vocal intonations, but imbuing them with a very human and lovable soul.

I have to confess that I have kind of a soft spot for Popeye the Sailor Man. It has seemed, for several years, that whenever things in my life are going especially well, he shows up in some way, sort of a spinach-loving good luck talisman. I did some of the best screenwriting of my career with a Popeye action figure watching over me from my desktop, and the last time I saw Altman's movie before reviewing it for this site was on the day when I met a woman with whom I had probably the best relationship of my life. All this goodwill toward the character has made me probably more disposed to be kind to Popeye than many people would be, and indeed, the film has largely been relegated to the slag heap of failed comic-book adaptations alongside such other duds as Spawn, The Spirit and Ghost Rider. I'm sure there's a lot of people my age who aren't even aware that there was a live-action Popeye movie, let alone one directed by a major cinematic talent and starring an Academy Award winning actor. But fans of the original Popeye cartoons, admirers of Robert Altman's work, and anyone looking for a change from the usual family musical would be well advised to check this picture out. It's one-of-a-kind, oddly endearing, and it's my first inductee into the Academy of the Underrated.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #83

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

The Writers

Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson; based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkein

Why It's Here

When I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson's massive screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's seminal fantasy trilogy, my reaction was not at all what I expected based on the astonishing trailers and the rapturous reviews the film had received. Basically, I was not too impressed. I went into the theatre expecting the Star Wars of sword-and-sorcery epics, a transcendent masterwork full of blood and iron, heroism and heartbreak. Instead, I got one really top-grade action sequence set in a mine choked with orcs and trolls, surrounded by a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo and way too many scenes of Hobbits acting cutesy and blithely irresponsible while playing with fireworks. Oh, and my favorite actor in the whole film, Sean Bean (as Boromir), got killed before the closing credits rolled, leaving me stuck with the prospect of two additional films without my favorite character from the first picture. In short, after watching Fellowship, I began to suspect that the fanboys were even more out of touch and questionable in their tastes than I had originally believed. I remember speculating to a friend of mine about the potential fate of New Line Cinema if this film tanked and they found themselves stuck with two more bloated special-effects pictures that they knew the audience had no appetite for. (New Line is indeed going out of business, but for reasons that likely don't have much to do with The Lord of the Rings, which was a record-shattering success and brought the studio its first-ever Best Picture Academy Award.)

My ignorance as to what was coming was based on a very simple reality: I had never read the original Tolkein trilogy, so it was hard for me to understand that this too-leisurely setup, with its Bilbo Baggins birthday party and irritating hobbits grumbling about "second breakfast", was necessary for the trilogy to create its sweeping narrative arc. The characters and situations had to start small and seemingly inconsequential in order for Tolkein to have somewhere to go, for the author to be able to make the situation ever more dangerous, the characters constantly evolving and challenging and surprising. Would Star Wars have been nearly as impressive if Luke Skywalker had started out as a nimble-sabered Jedi instead of as the callow, oblivious farm kid who grows into a great warrior? Well, in this scenario, I was Luke. I had to grow into the epic quest of the Fellowship of the Ring as they attempt to defeat the monstrous armies of the evil Lord Sauron and destroy his enchanted / cursed ring in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. I was finally on board by the end of the second film in the trilogy, The Two Towers, with its spectacular battle sequences and its introduction of the loathsome and pathetic Gollum, a triumph both of special effects and of complex antagonist characterization. And the third film, The Return of the King, finally delivered on the promise of the first film's hype. This is indeed cinema's seminal classic fantasy picture ("classic" meaning it contains all the elements we commonly associate with fantasy, elves and swords and the like). The fantasy fans finally had their Star Wars. The Return of the King reigned over the 2003 Academy Awards, winning all 11 of the prizes it was nominated for, tying with Ben-Hur and Titanic for most Oscars for a single film, and, like both of those movies, winning the Best Picture statue. I particularly remember applauding with delighted surprise when the film took home the one award that I figured it would most likely lose: Best Adapted Screenplay. After all, nine out of ten Oscar-nominated scripts are about nothing but estranged family members having tense confrontations in rooms. How many other films with orcs in them have ever even been nominated for writing Oscars? Granted, many folks said that the Return of the King sweep was meant more to reward co-writer / director Peter Jackson and his enormous crew for the monumental achievement of the entire trilogy rather than for this film alone. But in the case of the screenplay prize, I think that the award belongs to Return and Return only. (Ben-Hur lost the writing Oscar, incidentally, and Titanic wasn't even nominated…though you can read about it in the #95 slot on this list.)

On the surface of it, though, there's no reason why Return of the King's writing should be substantially better than that of its two predecessors. After all, it is literally a when-last-we-left-our-heroes continuation of the story begun in the first two films. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), the simple country hobbit cursed to carry Sauron's ring, continues to make his way to Mount Doom along with his faithful companion Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) as he is forced to contend both with the ring's poisonous effects on his body and soul and with Gollum (Andy Serkis), the former slave of the ring's power, who has been warped beyond repair by the ring and who will do anything to reclaim his "precious". Meanwhile, elsewhere in the magical kingdom of Middle-Earth, Sauron's armies are massing to lay siege to the mountainside city of Menas Tirith, one of the key strongholds of the forces of good. Leading the armies of honor and right are Gandalf the White (Sir Ian McKellen), the mighty wizard who knows better than most the dark power of the ring; mismatched brother warriors Legolas the elf (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli the dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), and of course, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the mysterious raider who comes to learn that he is the lost king of Gondor, and who reclaims his fallen sword and his regal command on the eve of the great battle to come. From there, the story proceeds forward in the necessarily episodic, cross-cutting fashion of the previous films, as the warriors face an army of orcs, trolls and towering six-tusked elephant creatures while Frodo and Sam encounter bloodthirsty goblins, a ravenous gigantic spider, and the craven machinations of Gollum, all while Frodo is getting sicker, and weaker, and more and more lost to the spell of the ring.

The Return of the King is a satisfying culmination of the narrative we had been following for (at that point) nearly six hours, tying up all the necessary threads and bringing the twin dramas of the story to a suitably rousing climax. But if all the film did was appropriately resolve the adventures of the Fellowship, it probably wouldn't be on this list. It is the way in which the writers strengthen and resolve the emotional journey of the trilogy's characters that elevates The Return of the King from the realm of ambitious popcorn flick and into the ranks of something truly special. The trilogy format has allowed the characters the luxury of gradual development and permits each major player to have their own arc, their own drama to be resolved, for better or worse. Because we have now spent so much time in the company of these characters and have become so invested in their struggles, we are able to sit back and watch with pleasure as Jackson, Walsh and Boyens bring each character's journey to a satisfying climax. We see Aragorn, who has grown in stature from the grim, shadowy Strider of the original picture into a square-jawed leader of men, take up his great sword and step to the head of the battle as a true king should. We see the great love of Aragorn's life, the beautiful elf-warrior Arwen (Liv Tyler), forced to choose between a life of elven immortality and one that will end in death but will bring her true love and family like she will otherwise never know. Legolas and Gimli, who bicker and banter their way through battles great and small, set aside their inter-species differences and achieve true friendship as they face Sauron's forces together. Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), the two tag-along hobbits who so annoyed me in the first film, come into their own here as warriors and true grown-up hobbits. Gollum continues to fight and lose his struggle with his addiction, and Frodo seems to shrink and darken as he follows Gollum down the path to soul-death at the hands of the ring.

Most spectacularly of all, Sam, who was my least favorite character in the original film with his doglike devotion to "Mister Frodo", emerges as the soul of the Tolkein story, as he proves himself maybe the greatest friend in all of cinema, refusing to allow Gollum to trick Frodo, battling the venomous arachnid Shelob as she threatens to devour Frodo, and generally proving himself the bravest, most capable hobbit who ever lived (by the time Sam, seeing Frodo desperately ill on the cliffs of Mount Doom, picks the sickly hobbit up on his shoulders and begins carrying him up the mountainside, I am almost in tears every time I see this film). So rich is the film in character that it even has room for an entirely new drama, as Pippin and Gandalf find themselves forced to contend with Denethor (John Noble), the steward of Menas Tirith and Boromir's father, who is so distraught with grief over his son's death that he comes to the brink of committing infanticide against his brave but "lesser" son, Faramir (David Wenham), first by sending him to his sure death in a mismatched battle and then by trying to burn his body on a funeral pyre…while he's still alive.

Every major character gets what he or she deserves, every relationship resolves on the note that suits it best, and all of this roiling emotion and conflict carries the day without being overwhelmed, as it easily could have been, by the stunning battles and tremendous special effects that surround the characters. Indeed, the primary reason that The Return of the King stands as dramatically tall as it does is because the writers never allow action and special effects to get in the way of their characters. For every jaw-dropping sight like the flight of the monstrous Nazgul over the walls of Menas Tirith, there is well-observed dialogue like Gandalf and Pippin's moving eve-of-battle conversation about death. For every bone-crunching battle like the orcs' siege of Osgiliath, there is a witty grace note like Gimli's comment upon realizing the odds facing them ("Certainty of death, small chance of success…what are we waiting for?"). For every hair's-breadth escape, there is a moment like Sam's reminiscence about enjoying the first strawberries of the season back home in the Shire. Action and special effects are fun, sure, but if they leave the filmgoer with nothing substantial to hold on to when the lights come up, the film in question will certainly fade from memory in time. The Return of the King always puts character and relationships first, and as such emerges as a masterpiece of its genre.

Of course, it also helps that the writers' work was bolstered by the quality of the source material. Since I saw the films, I have acquainted myself with Tolkein's work, and not to understate the case, but the man can write. Jackson, Walsh and Boyens are not intimidated by or uncomfortable with the archaic diction and poetic expressive style of Tolkein's dialogue, and they are willing to allow their characters to speak as Tolkein has them speak, in a grandiloquent, vaguely medieval manner that increases their mythic qualities rather than making them seem distant and alien to us. It is also to the writers' credit that every character in the picture speaks in their own very unique way. There is Gandalf's unforced, poetic dialogue (the wizard to his horse: "Ride, Shadowfax! Show us the meaning of haste!"). There is Aragorn's zealous martial speechifying ("By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, men of the West!"). There is the simple, direct speech of the hobbits, the mystical ruminations of the elves, and the good-natured sarcasm of Gimli. Most of all, there is the tortured syntax of Gollum, who always refers to himself in the first-person plural, who mangles his verbs and who emerges as a character with a dialogue pattern as distinctive and memorable as Yoda's. What's more, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens prove themselves to be true screenwriters by knowing when dialogue is not necessary, when it's best to just let the images carry the day. Most of the film's most powerful non-action moments are dialogue-free, as when Gollum gets his comeuppance and when a simple clinking of four flagons of mead does more to sum up the harrowing adventures the drinkers have faced than any hackneyed toast ever could. The intelligence of this approach helps to make TheReturn of the King a feast for the eyes, ears and heart.

Tolkeinites much more dedicated than I have written sprawling texts dissecting the complex themes of The Lord of the Rings, reading it as a religious allegory, a political fable, a war parable. I don't know the stories well enough to make any sort of grand statements such as those as to Tolkein's intentions. But as I watched the film again in preparation for this review, it occurred to me what, for me at least, is the narrative spine holding the trilogy together. The Return of the King, indeed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, is essentially a story about brotherhood. All of the characters in this film have their own dreams, their own desires, their own journeys and approaches to life, but the one thing that binds them together is the necessity of their mission to destroy the ring and defeat Sauron's armies. Hobbits can rise above their simple station in life, elves and dwarves can learn to work together in peace, fathers and sons can reconcile their grievances, and beings from different planes of existence can find love, if they all set aside what pushes them apart and concentrate their energies on what brings them together. The necessity of friendship is no better demonstrated than by the character of Sam, who cares for Frodo, gives him his food and water, literally carries his burdens and fights his battles for him…all because Frodo is his friend and because he knows that their duty is to a higher purpose than his own comfort or happiness. By the same token, one notes the infighting and hostility among the orcs and goblins of Sauron's armies, who act only out of self-interest as they fight over treasure and armor, threatening to stick each other like hogs rather than relinquish the best goods. And of course, Gollum starts the ball rolling by killing a friend rather than letting him possess the ring that causes the whole damn mess. We are currently in an age when the self-interest of opposing parties and people's unwillingness to recognize their essential sameness has led to political infighting, the loss of civility in public discourse, and the transformation of politics and war into petty squabbles over the bones of brotherhood. Perhaps The Return of the King was such a successful picture because people saw in it a vision of the way things could be, if we could all learn to set aside our differences and work for the best of all.

Two major quibbles keep The Return of the King from being a perfect screenplay. First of all, the picture lacks a clearly defined central villain. Saruman, the turncoat wizard ably embodied in the first two Rings pictures by Christopher Lee, was edited out of the theatrical release of the picture, leaving us stuck with an undifferentiated mass of trolls, orcs and monsters, and with the Eye of Sauron, which looks impressive enough, but seriously, is a big evil spotlight the best possible villain for a fantasy epic? Gollum is certainly sleazy and depraved enough to serve as a villain, but the pathos inspired by his obvious helplessness against the ring's power makes me almost reluctant to even refer to him as such. I'm not so reluctant, however, to say that the film's ending, or should I say endings, goes on for much too long. The film fades out and fades back up with new developments and resolutions for the characters so many times that many audience members at the initial screening I attended audibly grumbled every time the picture came back up (they had been sitting for almost 3 ½ hours, after all). I have done my best in this review to consider The Return of the King as a single entity separate from the other two films, but really, regarding this as the ending of a single 9 ½ hour monster rather than as one film is the only way one can really justify the foot-dragging nature of the conclusion.

Nevertheless, these faults do not ultimately detract much from The Return of the King's status as a keystone cinematic entertainment. It was fascinating last summer to listen to audiences talk enthusiastically about The Dark Knight, the exceptional superhero epic that could stand the chance, if history is kind to it, of finding its way onto future editions of this list. People were speaking about the picture, with its multi-tiered character arcs and complex, thematically rich narrative as if such things were complete novelties in the realm of big-budget popcorn cinema. They are rare, to be sure. But they're not unique. And The Return of the King is bold, exciting proof of that.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (boldface indicates a win): Academy Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films Award, Best Writing; BAFTA Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Chicago Film Critics Association Award, Best Screenplay; Online Film Critics Society Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Phoenix Film Critics Society Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; USC Scripter Award (shared nomination with novelist J.R.R. Tolkein); Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Adapted Screenplay

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #84

PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985)

The Writers

Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and Michael Varhol

Why It's Here

In writing this review, I run the risk of redundancy, as I am an admirer of Pee-wee's Big Adventure for many of the same reasons that I liked the previous film on my countdown, Happy Gilmore. Like Happy, this film was a profitable one upon its initial release, so much so that the actor who created and portrays Pee-wee, Paul Reubens, was able to spin the film's success off into a sequel (1988's Big Top Pee-wee, which is definitely not on my list) and a popular Saturday morning kids' series, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Unlike Happy Gilmore, however, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is a film that garnered a fair amount of critical respect upon its release, hailed by the cinematic intelligentsia as both a top-notch family comedy and a subversive goof on same. As time has gone on, though (and it sure has gone on; hard to believe, but is Pee-wee's Big Adventure is twenty-four years old), much of the credit for the film's artistic success has been retroactively awarded to its director, a then little-known former Disney animator making his first feature film...Tim Burton. Granted, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is an inarguably auspicious debut feature for Burton, and I think it still ranks among his best and most entertaining films. But even Burton, in Big Adventure's DVD commentary track, grants the lion's share of the film's success to the picture's freewheeling but surprisingly well-constructed screenplay, written by Ruebens, Michael Varhol, and the late Phil Hartman.

If you look at the picture from a certain angle, Pee-wee's Big Adventure ranks as perhaps the daffiest remake of a classic film ever committed to celluloid. Basically, this is de Sica's The Bicycle Thief filtered through a funhouse mirror. In place of the gritty, working-class milieu of the Italian film's postwar Rome, the writers give us a universe that is a quirky hybrid of '50s sitcom, creature feature and Looney Tunes surrealism (no accident that this film was released by Warner Bros., home of Bugs, Daffy and the gang). The protagonist here is not a down-at-the-heels proletarian, but a hyper-stylized, overgrown man-child in a too-tight gray suit, white bucks and red bow tie, whose days consist of nothing more ambitious than shopping for gag novelties at his favorite magic shop, downing a breakfast of pancakes and Mr. T cereal, and playing with the galaxy of toys glutting his fantastical suburban circus tent of a house (at times, the film runs the risk, liek the previously reviewed Adventures of Baron Munchausen, of being walked off with by the art direction team). But Pee-wee Herman has one reason for being: "the best bike in the whole world", a candy-colored dream machine with a flashy tiger's head adorning the handlebars and more neat gadgets that James Bond's Q could dream up. And when Pee-wee's bike is stolen and no one seems to realize that Pee-wee can't go on without his prized possession on which to zip around town, Pee-wee sets off on a cross-country adventure that takes him from the (non-existent) basement of the Alamo all the way to, what do you know, Warner Bros. Studios, where he leads the security guards on a wacky chase to rescue his beloved two-wheeler.

As you may have guessed from the plot outline above, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is basically a road picture, utilizing the genre's typically episodic structure as Pee-wee encounters a vast array of bizarre and colorful characters as he makes his way across America in search of his bike. Not an unworthy format for a story about a search for a bicycle; after all, one of the greatest of 1960s American films, Easy Rider, is a road picture about bikes. Intelligently, though, the writers do not allow the film to merely be the sum total of its individual episodes by giving Pee-wee's quest a concrete, strongly defined goal (something that Easy Rider, for all its thematic density and power, never really accomplishes) and by making all of the characters that Pee-wee encounters on his journey reflect something essential about his relationship to his bike. The folks back at home, such as lovestruck bike-shop mechanic Dottie (E.G. Daily) and loopy magic-shop owner Mario (Monte Landis), represent all the richness and friendship Pee-wee's life is full of, which is why they don't quite get how much a simple bicycle can matter to him. Escaped convict Mickey (Judd Omen), who Pee-wee hitches a ride with at the beginning of his quest, share's Pee-wee's digust with the unhelpful cops and the unfairness of life (of course, Mickey is not an innocent like Pee-wee, though he spares Pee-wee knowledge of his crimes by telling him he did time for cutting a "do not remove" tag off a mattress). The horror and uncertainty the world holds for Pee-wee without his bike is well-embodied by the ghostly truck driver Large Marge (Alice Nunn). The soulful diner waitress Simone (Diane Salinger), who shares with Pee-wee her dream of living in Paris, is the only one who perhaps understands the intensity of Pee-wee's obsession with his bike, and it's his single-minded pursuit of his dream that drives her to finally get up off her "big But" and make her dream happen. Interestingly, the few people that Pee-wee meets on the road with whom he does immediately hit it off are a gang of motorcyclists, who are none too pleased when Pee-wee knocks their bikes over like a row of dominoes. Even an obsessive hobbyist can meet his match when faced with a true gang of fanatics like these guys, and it almost looks like curtains for Pee-wee ("I say we scalp him! Then we tattoo him! Then we hang him! And then we kill him!"). But Pee-wee is able to win those folks over with his simple childlike enthusiasm, expressed in his dopey last request, a bar-top dance done in ridiculously oversized shoes, set to the Champs' classic blatty-saxed rock anthem "Tequila" (this routine became so associated with Pee-wee that he later repeated it during his Saturday Night Live hosting stint shortly following the film's release).

Pee-wee's ability to defuse a potentially deadly situation simply by being himself reminds us of one of the ways in which a successful comedy can often look much different than a successful dramatic film. The main engine of good drama is change: characters grow and learn as a result of their experiences and responses to the problems they face, and frequently emerge by the end of the film as much different individuals than those we found at the outset. Since the earliest days of Chaplin's Little Tramp, character-driven Hollywood comedy has often operated by a complete reversal of this notion. Many of cinema's greatest comic creations, from the Tramp to Buster Keaton's array of misfits to the Marx Brothers, all the way up to contemporary cinematic cut-ups like Austin Powers and Ace Ventura, do not triumph over their problems by learning to roll with the punches and grow with the experience, but by stubbornly remaining true to themselves, by forcing the world to roll with their punches, and by being unafraid of being who they are in the face of anything that life can throw their way. This tends to work more successfully with stylized characters headlining the story, and comic personae don't come much more stylized than Pee-wee Herman, the world's biggest little boy.

Fortunately, in writing this script, Reubens brought to the table a fully formed comic personality, honed through years of improv and concert performances (many shared with Hartman, his fellow alumnus of the L.A.-based Groundlings improv troupe), so all that was really necessary was to find the proper milieu to wrap him up in, turn him loose and let him do his thing. Pee-wee is indeed a singular and hilarious creation, and Pee-wee's Big Adventure is the work that most concretely codified the personality traits and characteristics that Reubens and his creative cohorts were to carry through virtually all of Pee-wee's future incarnations. Pee-wee is truly just a big overgrown kid, who wakes up in the morning and can't resist a go-round with his toys, even running over poor Mr. Potato Head with a toy fire truck, before getting started on his day. He has a weakness for toys and novelty gags, a squeaky, goobery voice, and a stuttery laugh that would be annoying if it wasn't so infectious. Bravely, the writers also allow Pee-wee Herman to embody those aspects of children's personalities that, truth be told, can be a little on the annoying side. He can be sometimes unexpectedly callous to the feelings of others, as when he deflects Dottie's attempts to ask him out on a date, and he is sometimes brutal, as only kids can be, in his verbal jousting with Francis (Mark Holton), the neighborhood creep (picture a mean, unpleasant Baby Huey). Witness this exchange, which is set off when Francis offers to buy Pee-wee's beloved bicycle:

Pee-wee: I wouldn't sell my bike for all the money in the world! Not for a hundred million billion trillion dollars!
Francis: Then you're crazy!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?
Francis: You're a nerd!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?
Francis: You're an idiot!
Pee-wee: I know you are but what am I?

To say nothing of Pee-wee's comment to Francis's butler when he is told the boy is having his bath ("Oh, really? Where they hosing him down?"). Indeed, the very narrative of the film, Pee-wee's obsessive continent-crossing quest for his bike, illustrates an essential quality of children's personalities: their near-lunatic latching on to concepts, ideas or objects and their single-minded devotion to them, come hell or high water. Like a shark chasing fresh chum, kids will tear a place apart in search of a lost toy, and will continue in their quest long after anyone and everyone else has lost interest. This is Pee-wee to his core. It doesn't matter that the cops have told them that finding his bike is a long shot. It doesn't matter that his best friends think he should just get on with his life. It doesn't matter that the bike might be all the way in Texas, and it doesn't matter that he has to brave wild animals, pet-shop fires, ghosts, bullriding, angry bikers, and the wrath of Warner Bros. Pictures (not to mention Simone's boyfriend, a bulldozing galoot named Andy) to find it. It's his bike, and like any self-respecting obsessive child, he's going to get it back if it kills him...or, at the very least, if it kills you. It's this commitment to the emotional integrity of a child's personality that makes Pee-wee's Big Adventure both a successful family entertainment (which allowed Pee-wee to spin off into a kids' TV show) and a fine example of a comedy that allows its hero to stubbornly refuse to change and still achieves narrative success. It is this reality, in fact, that in my mind accounts for the artistic failure of Big Top Pee-wee; by giving Pee-wee competing love interests and making it more of a romantic comedy, Reubens and his Big Top co-writer, George McGrath, shoot the Pee-wee character in the foot by giving him primarily adult concerns to deal with. Don't they realize that girls are icky?

All of this is making Pee-wee's Big Adventure sound like a doctoral thesis on theories and practices of comedy writing, when really, one of the main reasons that this film is on my list is that, over two decades down the road, it still makes me laugh like crazy. Many of Pee-wee's most beloved routines originated here, from the above-quoted back-and-forth with Francis to the big shoe dance to the silly moment where Pee-wee, stranded in darkness, is represented by a pair of glowing animated eyes (a bit that was often used to excellent effect on Pee-wee's Playhouse). Many of the film's jokes are fittingly juvenile, as when Pee-wee pranks both Francis and his father (played by venerated TV announcer Ed Herlihy) by offering them trick gum that causes black ink to spill from their mouths, and there's plenty of jokes and characters that, like many of the thinsg that we laugh at as kids, are funny for completely inexplicable reasons, as with the mohawked, leisure-suited Amazing Larry (Lou Cutell), who has the audacity to interrupt Pee-wee's extremely detailed recreation of the theft of his bike ("Is there something you'd like to share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?!?!"). But the writers obviously didn't forget that there'd be parents in the audience for this flick, and one of the reasons that Big Adventure's appeal has been so enduring is that the material is infused with a strong subversive streak that both tweaks the conventions of its comic universe and underscores the frequently scary and dark aspects of the best children's entertainment. Like Bugs Bunny, Pee-wee is forced to don drag and pose as Mickey's bubbly wife to get through a police roadblock, but unlike Bugs, Pee-wee forgets to doff his drag after they make it through, much to Mickey's discomfort. More than a few kids were traumatized by Large Marge's transformation into a goggle-eyed ghoul, the film's most surreal moment and the one that most clearly bears the fingerprints of Tim Burton behind the camera. The bikers are not cartoonish creations, but pose a genuine threat to Pee-wee, and family entertainment itself even undergoes an assault in the film's portrayal of the set of a maudlin TV show ruled by a pompous ogre of a child's TV star (played beautifully by Jason Hervey, who went on to genuine TV stardom as bullying older brother Wayne Arnold on The Wonder Years). The film even throws in a cameo by demonized glam rockers Twisted Sister, as Pee-wee, escaping through the Warners lot on his rescued bike, interrupts the shooting of their latest video, for a song with the very un-kid-friendly title "Burn in Hell".

Of course, the main reason that the humor of Pee-wee's Big Adventure works on so many levels is that, like with Happy Gilmore, the writers cared enough about their film to make it more than just a rickety framework for schtick performed in a vacuum by its star. Pee-wee Herman is funny partly because he operates within a funny universe, peopled with characters that all have their own agendas and manners of making us laugh, and part of the entertainment comes from watching Pee-wee attempt to negotiate these individuals' obsessions as he searches for his bike. There are characters who infuriate him, like Francis. There are characters who frighten him, like Large Marge. There are characters who outwit him, as with the scam-artist fortune teller Madame Ruby (Erica Yohn), who uses some signs visible outside her parlor window to convince Pee-wee that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo. There are characters who flat-out annoy him, like the foul-breathed Hobo Jack (Carmen Filpi), whose incessant warbling of classic old American tunes drives Pee-wee to leap for his sanity from a moving train. And of course, there's Tina (Jan Hooks), the perky Alamo tour guide in whom Pee-wee meets his match, his obsessive drive to recover his bike utterly flummoxed by her tunnel-visioned devotion to giving the most exhaustive survey of Alamo history imaginable, right down to detailing every single one of the thousands of uses for corn that she knows. Each of these characters is as fully developed as the narrative will allow, and each gives Pee-wee different problems and challenges to deal with. The manner in which he negotiates those challenges, all the while remaining true to his childlike self, is one of the main reasons why Pee-wee's Big Adventure endures as more than a formless collection of kiddified gags and routines.

Pee-wee's big adventure eventually winds up (where else?) on the big screen, as the at-first furious Warner Bros. execs, upon hearing Pee-wee's story, buy the rights and turn it into a movie. In the film's final great joke, the movie they make out of Pee-wee's exploits is a ridiculous grade-Z action-adventure picture, with the bike turned into a super-secret spy motorcycle and James Brolin hilariously cast as Pee-wee, red bow tie and all (Dottie, for the record, is played by Morgan Fairchild). Pee-wee himself has a cameo in his own story, as a hotel bellhop, his voice brilliantly overdubbed by a nasally, robotic monotone. It's yet another gag that works on two levels at once, as parents can enjoy the satire of schlocky Hollywood filmmaking and kids giggle over the silly voice now coming out of Pee-wee. And it is much to the enduring credit of Reubens, Varhol and Hartman that there are plenty of Big Adventure fans out there, yours truly included, who laugh just as hard at both jokes. With a little care for quality and a lot of attention to character, story and the conventions of comedy, these three scribes take what could have been an instantly forgettable, Ernest P. Worrell kind of film and transform it into what ranks, in my opinion, as a modern comedy classic.

ZOMBIE INTERNATIONALE: IT WATCHES "LE SAMOURAI"

My brother and I have been fellow cinephiles and co-writers for years, but we don't see eye to eye on everything. Our first major cinematic disagreement happened about 15 years ago, when we got into a spirited debate about whether or not a movie could succeed on style alone. My brother took the anti-Wildean position that without a strong screenplay and compelling story, a movie can be nothing more than a collection of disparate aesthetic elements, perhaps impressive on their own terms, but not enough to qualify as a truly successful film. I was on the other side of the aisle, espousing the belief that with the right mix of skilled cinematography, stylish costumes, and mood-elevating music, a film could transcend a perhaps-subpar script and become a satisfying experience in its own right. In the intervening decade and a half, my stance has shifted more or less completely over to my brother's side (at least as far as the film we were initially debating, the Alec Baldwin-starring The Shadow, is concerned). But then yesterday, I saw Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) for the first time, and I realized that I had found the film that could settle the style-vs.-story argument once and for all. Roger Ebert once wrote that what a film is about is much less important than how it it about it, and no film better exemplifies this philosophy than Melville's brooding, icy-cool crime thriller, which is quite simply one of the best-looking and most stylish films I have ever seen.

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a real nowhere man. He lives in a sparsely furnished room with no personal effects save for an incessantly chirping, feather-shedding bullfinch in a small cage. His wardrobe is composed entirely of sharp but anonymous suits and raincoats, always topped off with a cool fedora, the brim low over the eyes just so. And Jef's persona is as cold and blank as his living quarters and wardrobe. His voice is a deep, flat sound untouched by emotion, and his poker face and deep blue eyes seem dead to the excitement and stimulations of life. No surprise that this man kills for a living, with the icy professional detachment of an android. As the film begins, Jef goes about his bloody business. He acquires a gun and a fresh set of license plates from a chop-shop denizen with whom he exchanges not a solitary word. He pays a visit to Jane (Nathalie Delon, Alain's then-wife), a woman with whom he is obviously having an affair but with whom he stays only long enough to establish an alibi. Then, he drives to a glittery Paris nightclub and guns down the owner...but not before being sighted by Valerie (Cathy Rosier), the sexy pianist in the house jazz band. Jef is picked up by the cops and hauled into a police lineup, but Valerie's denial of his identity sets him free. He seems to be in the clear, but then he's double-crossed by the men who hired him for the nightclub job, and with the still-suspicious police on his tail, he's got to find out the reason for the betrayal, Valerie's shady motives for helping him out, and whether he has it in him to do what he's paid to do, no matter what.

The screenplay for Le Samourai (written by Melville and Georges Pellegrin) could very easily have (and in fact more or less has) provided the backdrop for a dozen humdrum noir thrillers about cold-blooded killers, their hot-blooded women, and canny cops in hot pursuit. But in this fine French film, as with fine French food, the magic is all in the presentation. First and foremost, one must acknowledge the sterling contribution of cinematographer Henri Decae, whose work here is flat-out some of the best and most incongruously beautiful I've ever seen. This is a world of ice blue, steel gray, and rich, threatening blacks, a fiercely gorgeous Parisian purgatory captured by Decae with crystal clarity and precision (the Criterion DVD transfer of this film is impeccable). Much of the film is done in measured still frames or fluid pans, but Decae occasionally mixes things up, as with a tense handheld cat-and-mouse chase through a Paris Metro station or a quick shot of violence captured as if from the window of a passing El train. Francois de Lamothe's art direction supports Decae's work with locations both seedy and sumptuous (or sometimes, like the nightclub, both at the same time), and composer Francois de Roubaix undergirds the enterprise with a tense, pulsating score inflected with '60s jazz cool.

Melville's direction here is singular in the thriller genre for its almost unparalleled quietude. When you're going to see a film about hitmen and femmes fatale, the last thing you expect is silence. But Le Samourai features no dialogue whatsoever until about ten minutes in, when a terse exchange between Jef and Jane gives way to several more minutes of silence before Jef arrives at the backroom card game that will provide the second part of his alibi. The whole film is like this: brief, brusque dialogue exchanges buffered by extended scenes of silence. The whole Paris Metro chase is dialogue-free, as is an enthralling sequence in which cops plant a bug in Jef's rented room and listen from a hotel across the street, for minutes on end, to nothing but the soft sounds of Jef moving around the room and the neverending chirping of his bird. I would guess that Jef himself speaks fewer lines of dialogue than any protagonist in cinematic history, and when he kills, it's without wisecracks or verbal preludes of any kind; we know that violence is coming not when he promises it, but when he slips on his light gray linen gloves, the better to keep gunpowder off his impeccably manicured hands. Even the violence itself, while startling, is also curiously muted, over in a flash and without the blood and chaos that frequently accompanies such occurences in both other films and real life. Moviegoers more accustomed to the constant sound and fury of contemporary thrillers will likely find Le Samourai's approach to the genre peculiar if not downright dull. But for me, it worked in much the same way that the canyons of silence functioned in 2001: A Space Odyssey (no. 96 on the Zombie's 101 Favorite Screenplays list). By withholding aural stimulation from us, Melville draws us further into his film's penetrating images, making us work with the director as we rise to meet his film rather than having it come at us from the screen. It should also be said that the film, while not a cut-a-minute blur of action, is never slow-moving; Jef's dilemma compels the viewer relentlessly forward, and the whole affair wraps up in a just-about-perfect 105 minutes.

Melville's actors are fully in the groove of their director's approach, their performances matching the visuals' tone of cool surface detachment and deep inner turmoil. Francois Perier is suitably oily as the police superindentant on Jef's trail (he has one surpremely sleazy scene where he attempts to blackmail Jane into betraying her lover), and the pixie-haired Rosier is sexy and dangerous in the way that only Frenchwomen with secrets can be. Jacques Leroy also has a few strong moments as the double-crossing gunman who figures in the film's most explosive episodes of violence (in one startling moment, his hand, holding a loaded automatic, crashes unexpectedly through a window). But naturally, if Delon doesn't work, the movie doesn't either, and the actor's work here compliments the director's style like a hand in a gray linen glove. For the bulk of the film, Delon pares his movements down to the bare essentials, his face betrays not even a flicker of emotion, and his eyes are as cold and lifeless as the frequently gray sky that glowers over his head. But as with the silences that accompany his bloody progress through Paris, Delon's becalmed sense of menace draws us into the character's predicament as we scrutinize the blank, handsome planes of his face for some semblance of humanity. It's therefore surprising and unexpectedly affecting when we find just that, as when Jef tries key after key in his latest pilfered automobile and his face grows subtly but noticeably desperate as his escape is delayed by precious and ever-increasing seconds. It's a tough balance between a seemingly blank performance that actually conceals untold depths and a portrayal that's just lifeless, and Delon gives us a zombified dealer of death whose robotic facade hides his bone-deep solitude (it's no surprise that Delon played one of literature's great nowhere-man manques, Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, in Purple Noon around the same time).

Really, the whole film exudes this sense of buried secrets, pains left umplumbed, passionate emotions forever unexpressed. From Camus and Sartre to The Professional's Leon (a more sentimental heir to Jef Costello's hitman tradition), no one does existential angst quite like the French, and Le Samourai is arguably the cinematic apotheosis of Gallic gloom and darkness. This is not a depressing film, but it's a dour and impenetrable one in many ways, and contemporary audiences who expect a little touch of the human even in their stone-cold killers (witness Jules and Vincent's extended dialogues about food in Pulp Fiction) may be put off by the utter implacability of Delon's gun for hire. But the film's unrelenting aura of impending dread and the subtle sadness of Delon's azure eyes will leave the viewer forever searching for clues to Jef's inner pain, the past anguish and present persecutions that have driven a young man of potential to dedicate his life to ending life. French gunslinging bad-asses are never just bad-asses, and Melville is not unaware of the romanticism inherent in Jef's solitary, brooding existence. It's the same thing that compels young girls to fantasize about the bloodsucking Byronic swain of the Twilight books: great physical beauty + deep reserves of inner torment + a touch of potentially lethal danger = almost overpowering allure. And of course, like many of the great existentialist narratives of the 20th century, Le Samourai culminates in a final deadly act that, once we realize its true nature, reveals itself as that most romantic of gestures...an act of self-sacrifice.

Le Samourai is a film that has perhaps meant more to other filmmakers than to general audiences. Its influence can be seen in the work of directors from Tarantino to Walter Hill, not to mention Hong Kong action impresario John Woo, who has called Melville's thriller a nearly perfect movie and who named the existential hitman in his 1989 masterpiece The Killer Jeff in the film's honor. But really, for all its impact on the action-thriller genre, Le Samourai is a singular viewing experience. I will be keeping an eye on the calendars of the repertory houses here in town, because I intend to see this film on a big screen as soon as I can. Melville's film tells a story that has been told a hundred times, and will likely be told a hundred times more. But no one's ever told it with this kind of style...and as the French themselves might say, vive la difference.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #85

HAPPY GILMORE (1996)

The Writers

Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler

Why It's Here

I have to be perfectly honest with all of you. I was dreading having to write this one. Most of the films on my list, even if they are not pictures with sterling critical reputations and mantelpieces groaning with screenwriting awards, at least have their defenders, people who will trumpet their screenplays as fine examples of the cinematic writing craft, if not out-and-out masterworks. Most of them received reviews which, if not exactly glowing, were nonetheless mostly positive, and they are films that one can espouse an appreciation for among the film world's intelligentsia without having to worry about having your taste or basic understanding of the medium brought into question. None of these claims can be made about Happy Gilmore, a rowdy golf-links comedy that was a moderate commercial success upon its initial release, but was basically dismissed by the majority of critics as an agreeably mindless diversion at best, a rock-stupid nail in the comedy coffin at worst. The film has an average score of 31 on Metacritic.com (indicating "Generally negative reviews"), and Adam Sandler, who stars in the title role and co-wrote the film's screenplay with his longtime Saturday Night Live collaborator Tim Herlihy, was a Golden Raspberry nominee for Worst Actor for his performance here. In short, this may be the first time that Happy Gilmore has found its way onto anyone's list of the best anything. Ernest Lehman, who was the most recent screenwriter honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars, gave us the screenplays for such classics as North By Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success, and West Side Story. His work does not make an appearance on my list of my 101 Favorite Screenplays. Adam Sandler's does. And that sound you just heard was the door slamming on my reputation as a film reviewer.

But honesty is indeed the best policy, and within the realm of the slapdash, star-driven "moron comedy" that made such a huge resurgence in the late '90s, there was almost no film that made me laugh harder and more often than Happy Gilmore. Sandler and Herlihy harnessed the unique nature of Sandler's dominant comic persona, a bizarre blend of milquetoasty loser, overgrown man-child, and aggressive borderline-psychopath, and paired it with the dignified serenity of the centuries-old game of golf. The result features as many laugh-out-loud moments as any film released in what was, admittedly, not a dynamite period for American film comedy. But the film is not just a disjointed collection of stand-alone jokes, as Happy's climb from the dregs of amateur hockey obscurity to the heights of professional golf fame is surprisingly compelling. We find ourselves genuinely rooting for Happy as he claws his way to the top and faces off against his nemesis in "the big match" to settle the entire story once and for all. Granted, if you didn't already know the outcome of the big match before you even started reading this review, you've apparently never seen a movie about sports. But as with all sports films, the journey is the destination, and Happy's is more entertaining and engaging than most.

The film begins with Happy failing yet again in his latest tryouts for his local amateur hockey squad. He's got a fierce slapshot and "a lot of intensity"…so much intensity, in fact, that he's the only player in the history of hockey to ever take off his skate and try to stab another player with it. He's not nearly as skilled as skating on those skates, though, and after yet another rejection, he arrives home to find that his kindergarten-teacher girlfriend is leaving him to his futile dreams and grubby apartment. Even his impromptu apartment-intercom serenade of Exile's "Till the Night Closes In" (complete with him lovingly licking the intercom speaker) doesn't win her back. The cherry on top of his turd sundae of a life plops down when he finds out that his beloved grandmother (Frances Bay), who raised him after his father was killed by a fast-flying puck, is about to lose the house he grew up in for failure to pay back taxes. The movers clearing out his grandma's old junk come across a set of golf clubs, and Happy, after being challenged to a long-ball contest by the moving men, finds out much to his surprise that his massive hockey shot translates well to the little white ball. He uses his newfound skills to hustle a few suckers at a local driving range, but hockey is still where his heart is…until Chubs Peterson (Carl Weathers), the pro at Happy's local golf club, convinces him that with a little skill, he could make the shot at the big time that Chubs never got. Not because he's black, of course, but because of the alligator that bit off his right hand, forcing him to wear a not-at-all-convincing wooden substitute. Realizing big-money golf tournament purses are his one ticket to get his grandma's house back, Happy joins the pro tour, but he's got a lot of obstacles to overcome. There's his general lack of understanding of the game of golf, from his complete inability to putt to his boorish behavior at the normally staid country clubs that host the tournaments. There's his volcanic spurts of rage, which result in him punching bystanders, screaming torrents of obscenities when putts fail to drop ("Suck my white ass, ball!"), and getting into a fistfight with game show host Bob Barker during a pro-am tournament (Barker, by the way, hands Happy's ass to him). And there's Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), the arrogant top pro on the tour, who has never won the Tour Championship, and who is not about to let his biggest chance be taken from him by some "freak sideshow clown". "You better watch out," he warns Happy, "'Cause I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast." Happy's giggly reply: "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?"

And so it goes. In case you hadn't already gathered from the very mention of Adam Sandler in this review, a good deal of the humor in Happy Gilmore is juvenile, pointlessly surreal, or flat-out disgusting. Happy's caddy is a homeless man named Otto (Allen Covert), who is prone to cleaning his nasty underwear in the course's ball-washing machine. When Chubs exhorts Happy to find his "happy place" to calm his rage on a golf course, Happy imagines a bucolic Eden with bottomless pitchers of beer, his grandma rolling in dough…and a midget dressed in a cowboy costume riding a tricycle. A montage of Happy's past odd jobs, shot in the style of home movies, includes Happy using everything from a gas-station hose to a construction traffic cone as a substitute phallus to wave around and jab in co-workers' ears. In other words, Noel Coward this ain't. Indeed, Happy Gilmore is arguably the most uneven screenplay on this entire list. For every joke that hits home, there is one that falls flat, and the duds are momentous ones. If nothing else, the film taught me that Lee Trevino is as ham-fisted a comedian as he is magical with the clubs. The nadir of the film's comedy comes from Donald (SCTV alumnus Joe Flaherty), an obnoxious, needy fan hired by Shooter to heckle Happy and throw off his game, finally resorting to hitting him with his old VW bug to try to get him out of the tour championship. Though the notion of a golfer getting run over mid-tournament (and still finishing!) is an amusing one, Donald doesn't have one funny line, and the amount of screen time he takes up and the importance he is given to the plot puts a major lag in the film's second act.

But the jokes that do hit are so effective and land frequently enough that Happy Gilmore emerges as arguably the finest comedy to come out of Sandler's SNL-era cast. Some of the funnier moments are admittedly barnside-broad, as when Happy gets into a rollicking brawl with the one-eyed alligator that stole Chubs' hand years ago. But there are also a few moments that are funny in a much subtler way, as in the scene where the director of the pro golf tour (played by the film's director, Dennis Dugan) speaks with his publicity director, Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen), about Happy's latest on-course outburst. This entire scene is underscored with the network-TV playback of Happy's tirade on a nearby television, a torrent of bleeped-out profanities that runs about a minute and a half and is capped off with Happy's bellowed "piece of monkey BEEEEEEP!" Even Happy's perhaps-inevitable-in -retrospect courting of Virginia, the first person on the tour who really believes he can make it as a golfer, is played for some good laughs. His ever-so-charming opening line? "My girlfriend's dead, you know. She fell off a cliff and was killed on impact." Later, when Happy and Virginia go ice skating together, he challenges her to nail a slapshot from center ice, and if she loses, she has to give him a kiss. It's a sweet setup…until she nails the shot dead in center net, causing Happy to exclaim, with his customary eloquence, "Holy shit!"

One of the nicest things about Herlihy and Sandler's screenplay is that it does not insist upon making Happy Gilmore the only funny character or the only element of his universe played for laughs. I cannot stand it when a comedy takes place in a recognizably real universe…except for one character who is on comedy overload, carrying the film's entire comic burden on his back and forcing the rest of his cast members to just stand around looking embarrassed while he heaves fistfuls of shtick at the audience (I wasn't a huge fan of most of Jim Carrey's early comedies for exactly this reason). Perhaps owing to Sandler's somewhat more laconic comedy style, Happy Gilmore constructs an entire comic world around Happy, with each character bringing their own personae and styles of humor to the equation. There's everything from Otto's grungy slob comedy to the mellow self-improvement sendup of Kevin Nealon as an admiring golfer who gives Happy on-course advice ("Doing the bull dance. Feeling the flow. Working it. Working it.") to the downright disturbing interludes with Happy's grandmother, who is forced into a nursing home after losing her house and who finds herself at the mercy of a sadistic orderly (a pre-megastardom Ben Stiller) who forces his elderly charges to knit black-market quilts and throws anyone who complains out onto the grounds for landscaping duty. Rather than clatter against each other and create an unwieldy comedy crazy quilt, these characters weave nicely together to create consistent humor with different pitches and modes. Herlihy and Sandler seem to understand that if you only have one way to laugh at a movie, sooner or later that kind of laugh will dry up on you, and you'll be left with nothing. They wisely don't let that happen, and it's something of a house style that has carried forward into other films they've written and produced together, all of which have an ample supply of comic characters and situations to carry the humor forward.

In one of Herlihy and Sandler's boldest strokes, they give some of the film's biggest laughs to their antagonist. The weak link of many mainstream comedies is that they do not offer a strong enough force for the hero to come into conflict against. The villains in these films are usually bland and forgettable, exceptionally generic in their evil designs against the hero, and incapable of generating a number of laughs sufficient to justify the screen time the films waste on their duplicitous machinations. That is not the case with Shooter McGavin, who is possibly the funniest character in the entire film. All of the arrogance and sense of entitlement of the modern pro athlete rolled into one smug, brilliantined package, Shooter treats everyone who comes into his orbit with the same subtle contempt. Upon first meeting Virginia, he demeaningly asks her to get him a Pepsi, then adds, with a little head cock that's apparently meant to be seductive, "Diet." He bores his fellow pro golfers with an overchewed array of cocky hand gestures and stale, repeated jokes (we twice hear him blasting a fellow golfer for spending "more time in the sand than David Hasselhoff"), and he seems to regard his soon-to-be coronation as the Tour Championship as both his birthright and a foregone conclusion. So when Happy comes along with his populist appeal and his radically long drives, Shooter sees a threat that he is helpless to defeat, and he pours hilarious invective upon both Happy ("Yeah, how'd he finish? Dead last? Yeah, he had a good day, though, thanks.") and his fans ("Damn you people! Go back to your shanties!"). In his funniest moment, he complains to the tour director about the fans Happy has brought to the golf course, particularly "two fat biker people" he saw having sex in the woods off the seventeenth hole. "How am I supposed to chip with that going on?" Shooter splutters. A lot of credit must go to Christoper McDonald, who presents a nonpareil display of put-upon bluster as Shooter, but it's Herlihy and Sandler's raw materials that allowed him to knock this character out of the park.

Of course, as with all well-told stories, it is not just the external antagonist that Happy must defeat to achieve his goals. Happy's biggest problem is not Shooter and his arrogant attempts at sabotage, but his own instances of self-sabotage, the way he lets his sometimes psychotic emotional outbursts jeopardize his career and potential happiness. We can see from just our brief glimpses of Happy on the ice at the film's outset that his furious temper has contributed to the scuttling of his hockey career, and early on, it looks like the same might happen to his burgeoning identity as a professional golfer. Golf is a world that (the antics of John Daly notwithstanding) generally prides itself on decorum, class and centuries of time-honored tradition, and from the jump, Happy does everything he can to puncture that with his explosions of aggression and violence on and off the course. He does everything from breaking sand trap rakes and throwing them into the woods (he tells Virginia he didn't break it; he was "just testing its durability") to threatening Shooter McGavin with a broken beer bottle. All of this behavior makes him a singular and popular figure within the golfing world of the film, but it also threatens to shoot down his career when he is unable to get enough control of his anger to put together a decent short game and hit a respectable putt. The breaking point comes after Happy's fight with Bob Barker gets him suspended from the pro tour. He manages to support himself off the course by signing a lucrative endorsement contract with Subway (a clever usage of the ubiquitous product placement rife in contemporary sports), but at this point, at last, money is not enough to satisfy Happy. From the start, he's been saying that he is only playing golf to make money; when he wins his first tournament, he even makes plans to remove the golfer from the top of his trophy and replace him with "a little hockey guy". But after the Barker suspension, he realizes that it's his pride on the line…his pride in his golf game. So he goes to Chubs, throws himself at the old golfer's mercy ("I was wrong, you were right. You're smart, I'm stupid. You're very good looking. I'm not attractive."), and gets to work on finding his "happy place", learning to putt, and building his game into a force to be reckoned with just in time for his Tour Championship showdown with the odious Shooter. Granted, none of this is virgin territory for sports pictures. The great raw talent who needs only technique to be "the best", the disgraced former champion pulled out of mothballs to shape his protégé, even the death of the trainer before the big match, giving the young tyro an added incentive for winning the big one…it's all been done before, and perhaps better than it's done here. But just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it can't be deployed effectively, and by playing to the strengths of the underdog sports genre, Herlihy and Sandler undergird their laughs with a solid narrative bedrock.

Many students of comedy have unfavorably compared Happy Gilmore to another links-based comedy starring former Saturday Night Live cast members, namely 1980's Caddyshack, written by Brian Doyle-Murray, Douglas Kenney, and Harold Ramis. Indeed, it would be naïve to assume that Happy Gilmore, with its raucous on-course antics and snobs-versus-slobs underdog-triumph narrative, was not influenced by the earlier film. For me, Happy is the superior picture, but this is admittedly for intensely personal reasons. You will not see many comedies from the late '70s and early '80s making their way onto my list, mainly because most of these films, which earned R ratings for their sexual content and nudity, wrap their humor in a smug, self-congratulatory smuttiness that I find intensely off-putting. For every gag in Caddyshack that hits home squarely, as with much of the Rodney Dangerfield / Ted Knight material, there's a moment where the film seems to be high-fiving the characters just because they got to see some tits. It puts us in the position of rooting for the characters to catch a glimpse of female flesh; it's dehumanizing to the female characters and, I think, a bit creepy. Granted, Caddyshack is not the worst culprit of this style of comedy (that "prize" goes easily to 1982's Porky's, arguably the worst comedy I have ever seen), but for me, it just keeps me from enjoying the material as much as I'd like to. The PG-13-rated Happy Gilmore has a few marginally smutty moments, but Herlihy and Sandler almost always undercut the crassness with something just plain silly, as when Happy autographs the breasts of a hot young blonde…then is immediately confronted by a blue-haired grandma who opens her housedress and asks him to sign her low-hanging goodies (much to the film's credit, Happy doesn't get grossed out by this, but cheerfully obliges, cementing Happy as a true golfing man of the people). It's the difference between being emotionally invested in a character and simply observing their behavior. Seriously, does anyone really give a damn about Michael O'Keefe's horndog caddy character in Caddyshack? And for anyone who wishes to make some claim that Happy Gilmore is just bargain-basement crudity and Caddyshack represents a more elevated form of comedy, I have one word for you: zootie.

It seems to me that Happy Gilmore has proven to be an unusually enduring film for its genre. The multiplexes of today are chock-full of here-today, gone-tomorrow bonehead comedies, but this is one that folks still seem to watch regularly and recall with fondness. The film is thirteen years old now, and yet you can still easily find it in the comedy section of your local video store. Can you say the same about 2006's Let's Go To Prison? Or about College, which came out around this time last year? Happy Gilmore has hung in there as a favorite that viewers still return to and laugh, and I think a tip of the Callaway cap goes to Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler for giving their throwaway comedy surprising staying power. I don't know if people will still be watching it a hundred years from now, but whenever I am watching it, trust me, I'm laughing a lot.

THE BARD OF SHERMER, ILLINOIS: AN APPRECIATION OF JOHN HUGHES

Though tragic, it is also strangely fitting that John Hughes died young, at the age of 59, this past Thursday in New York City. After all, one of Hughes' principal themes as a filmmaker was the perils and pressures of youth. More than any filmmaker before or since, Hughes has been credited with giving a sharp, witty voice to the average American teenager. So often depicted prior to his ascendancy as either impossibly Beaver Cleaverized goody-goodies or sex-crazed delinquents (or, in the slasher-movie boom that preceeded his career, as fodder for a madman's machete), teenagers were instead portrayed by Hughes as smart, articulate, and fully feeling, if not quite comprehending, the full weight of the massive changes they were experiencing as they lived, loved and struggled their way toward adulthood. The result was a collection of motion pictures that became signal texts for an entire generation.

Born in Lansing, Michigan in 1950, Hughes was forged as a writer in the fire of the National Lampoon. His first produced writing credit was five episodes of the TV series Delta House, an ill-starred spinoff of the smash hit film Animal House, followed by the Lampoon feature film Class Reunion. Several big hits followed, including Mr. Mom (1983) and another picture written for the Lampoon, Vacation (also 1983), directed by the great Harold Ramis. Already, Hughes's signature themes as a writer were beginning to emerge: the complicated dance of family relations, the horrors and pleasures of American middle-class life, and a marriage of hard-nosed interpersonal reality with a high-concept commercial sensibility perhaps unavoidable in a member of the first true TV generation.

The following year saw the release of Sixteen Candles, Hughes's first effort as a director and the film that began America's love affair with Molly Ringwald, whose enshrinement as America's Sweetheart even saw her face on the cover of both Time and Life. What's remarkable about Hughes's film is that, even though it is populated with characters who are, to put it charitably, broad comic types (such as the horny foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong, memorably played by Gedde Watanabe), it is not afraid to puncture the hard carapace of comedy to reveal the confused, frustrated person struggling to be heard underneath. Anthony Michael Hall's "Geek", scheming throughout the film to acquire a pair of Ringwald's panties as evidence of his (unachieved) sexual conquest of her, may be sleazy and annoying, but he's also deep down, just a kid trying to figure out his place in the world as much as Ringwald's Samantha is. What's more, he's fully aware of his geek status, his identity as "king of the dipshits", and of his own near-helplessness to transcend a role that he himself has so thoroughly cultivated. It is also noteworthy that Samantha herself does not really fall into any of the usual "types" associated with teen flicks prior to Sixteen Candles's release. She is not a sporty girl, a preppy girl, a punky girl, or a prom queen. She's just a girl with an embarassing family and a mad, helpless crush on the most popular guy in school...a girl just like many who were in the audience and who helped to make Sixteen Candles a zeitgeist-capturing hit.

Hughes' subsequent teen films continued his trend of exploding stereotypes with uncommon eloquence and sympathy. Weird Science (1985), his first foray into unabashedly fantastical territory, concerned two science nerds who use their home computer, augmented with a little boost from NASA, to bring a Barbie doll to life and, hopefully, to usher them into full sexual maturity. But Lisa (played, in a deft comic performance, by model Kelly LeBrock) has other things in mind. Her mission, as she sees it, is to transform Gary (Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) from stunted, immature dorks into the strong, capable men she knows they can become...indeed, the men that most high-school nerds can blossom into if they'll only emerge from the basement and taste a little life once in a while. Granted, most teens' coming of age doesn't involve a nuclear bomb in their parents' kitchen, a hilarous outing to a black nightclub ("EVERY damn NIGHT?"), or their bullying older brother Chet (a gut-busting Bill Paxton) transformed into a slime-spewing toad creature. But none of this sci-fi material would play if Hughes didn't root it in Gary and Wyatt's very real desire for acceptance and understanding of their unique gifts. Lisa may not pop these boys' cherries (how could she, when they insist on showering with her in their jeans?), but she pops the cork on the champagne bottle of their lives, and teaches them to at last drink deeply.

1986's Pretty in Pink, written and produced by Hughes (Howard Deutch directs, as he would for the following year's Some Kind of Wonderful), brings class into the mix of strains threatening the psychic health of the teenager. Andie (Ringwald) is a sweet, sincere girl from the wrong side of the tracks, saddled with an unemployed father (the great Harry Dean Stanton) and a wardrobe of slapped-together oddments she makes herself. Though she has an undyingly devoted acolyte in the self-consciously hip Duckie (Jon Cryer), she pines for Blane (Andrew McCarthy), a slick rich kid who faces a dilemma: hang onto his flawless image of preppy cool, or explore his real feelings for Andie and risk the ostracism of his peers? It's a very real problem that many kids have faced; high shcool is, after all, a time in life when image matters above perhaps all else, and it often seems a fate worse than death to be caught dating the "wrong" person. I myself never struggled with this problem in high school. I was, you see, the guy who never got the girl, so when I watch the film, I don't identify with either Andie or Blane, but with Duckie, who (despite the subtly homosexual coding of his mannerisms and wardrobe) is obviously in love with Andie and who finds himself in the agonizing position of having to help her win another guy. Granted, I never had to help my best girl friend get with somebody else, but I watched plenty of girls I had crushes on going out with "lesser" dudes, and so a small part of me still hasn't forgiven Hughes for the kiss that ends the film, my pick for the most frustrating and unsatisfying movie conclusion of the '80s. I mean, I know it's what Andie wanted, but still...

The same year's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, directed as well as written and produced by Hughes, is fantasy material of another sort. Ferris (Matthew Broderick) is a feckless wunderkind armed with an arsenal of clever lies (abetted by a sophisticated home computer setup) enabling him to dupe his family and the entire city of Chicago into believing he is home sick with a near-fatal disease. In reality, he has decided to give himself, his girlfriend Sloan (Mia Sara) and his sad-sack buddy Cameron (Alan Ruck) the hooky-playing adventure of a lifetime, complete with lunch at the Gold Coast, a ballgame at Wrigley, and an impromptu parade performance of "Twist and Shout." This is Hughes's broadest teen comedy of the period, with the slapstick comeuppance of Principal Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) presaging the brutal physical humiliations of Hughes's 1990s output. Ferris himself is perhaps Hughes's least realistic film hero, a Teflon sharpie with a penchant for speaking to the camera and a throwaway manner of relating to the world that scarcely reflects the down-to-the-bone realism of Hughes's previous onscreen teens. That realism is still there, though, in Ruck's Cameron, a hypochondriacal neurotic ground down by his parents' perfectionism, and in Jennifer Grey's Jeanie, Ferris's older sister, whose hostility to her brother is most likely just the blowback of her own unrequited love for her Ferris-worshipping folks. Even in a world with a watertower emblazoned with "Save Ferris", Hughes can't help but get a little truth into the mix.

Truth is the entire recipe in The Breakfast Club, a film that, to me, defines its era as succinctly as Saturday Night Fever does for the previous decade...which is odd when you consider that, at its base, The Breakfast Club is a film that could take place any place at any time. Five kids from various social strata come to Shermer High School in suburban Illinois for a Saturday-afternoon all-day detention, during which they are each charged with writing an essay answering a simple question: "Who do you think you are?" These kids would at first appear to have nothing in common, but as they spend the afternoon arguing, goofing off and finally opening up, they realize that they were all brought to this juncture by very similar pressures and tensions placed upon them by the images they have chosen to cultivate. Andrew (Emilio Estevez), a star of the wrestling team, is in detention for taping a nerdy kid's buttocks together, playing out the alpha-male jock fantasies of his domineering father...a dad who, in the effect he has on his son, doesn't sound all that dissimilar from that of John Bender (Judd Nelson), a pot-smoking, switchblade-wielding petty hood with unexpected sensitivities beneath his gruff, teacher-baiting facade. Claire (Ringwald), the prom-queen princess who got busted ditching class to go shopping, tearfully admits that she hates much of what peer pressure has made her become...even though she also admits, reluctantly, that she would blow off the geeky Brian (Hall) if he said hello to her in the hall the following week. Brian himself (a friend of the nerd that Andrew tormented with tape) brought a flare gun to school, a desperate plan to rescue himself from a scholarship-jeopardizing failing grade in a shop class he was forced to take. And Allison (Ally Sheedy), the self-conscious weirdo of this group? Well, she may like to put Pixie Stix and potato chips on her sandwich, but there's apparently nothing wrong with her that a makeover couldn't fix (incidentally, she's the only one of this group who seems to be there by choice; on a Saturday morning, she just has nowhere else to go). Hughes' brilliance here is in revealing that these kids are not inflexible, hemmed-in collections of traits and social signifiers, but that they are all, at the core, the same: confused, frustrated, witty, bright and fighting against all odds to make themselves heard. As Brian sums up in the essay he composes on their behalf: "Each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal." And the same applies for all of us out there, in some way, which is why The Breakfast Club cuts so close and has left such a deep impression on many of us. The richness of the roles, the sharp perception of the writing and the film's one-set aesthetic (except for a few brief forays into the school hall and the principal's office, the entire film takes place in the library) has made me surprised that no one has ever attempted to adapt The Breakfast Club for the stage. I think these would be wonderful roles for young actors to cut their teeth on...provided they could work the miracles that Hughes's young cast does here. And of course, the film's main title song, Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me", has become, for me, the one song that I think of when I hear the words "the Eighties".

In the late 1980s, Hughes's films began to address more adult concerns. 1987's Planes, Trains and Automobiles chronicles the misadventures of a mismatched duo as they attempt to get home for Thanksgiving, and in its own broad sitcom way, it's as profound an examination of modern loneliness and alienation as Waiting for Godot. Steve Martin's Neal Page, an uptight, anal-retentive businessman, has so stuffed himself into his social role as husband and breadwinner that he is no longer able to get his nose into the real dirty business of living. He meets his match in John Candy's Del Griffith, a jovial lug whose status as "everybody's friend" masks the fact that he has no real friends, and indeed no home; he has been aimlessly drifting from city to city selling his shower curtain rings ever since his wife died. Amidst all the film's blustering slapstick and casually surreal gags (such as a lighting-quick flash of Neal and Del as goggle-eyed skeletons as their rented car crashes) is a very touching parable about two guys locked in various modes of self-imposed isolation who learn, just a little bit, to really open themselves up to the world, and to each other. The following year's She's Having a Baby, my pick for Hughes's most underrated film, presents the Hughes teenager growing up and tentatively facing adult responsibilities for the first time (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern are an effective pair as the young couple struggling to hold on to their adolescent dreams in the face of impending parenthood), while a similar issue faces the titular character of 1989's Uncle Buck, in which John Candy's shambling ne'er-do-well (John Bender in early middle age, perhaps?) is forced to grow up fast when a family tragedy puts him in charge of his sister's kids for the week.

And then came 1990's Home Alone (Hughes wrote and produced, Chris Columbus directed), one of the most financially successful comedies of all time and the film that was to essentially define the rest of Hughes's filmmaking career. The film starts out as a whimsical fable about precocious eight-year-old Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin, who basically ruled the world for a short period after this film's release) who, through a series of mixups, is left home alone when his well-off family jets off to Paris for the Christmas holidays. Kevin engages in some typical kids-off-the-leash craziness, scarfing junk food and running around the house screaming, not to mention befriending the lonely old man (Roberts Blossom) who the other neighborhood kids have branded a Boo Radley-type boogeyman. But then Kevin comes into conflict with the two bumbling crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) casing the neighborhood for a little holiday heisting, and he lays comic waste to them with a series of elaborate booby traps that leave them burned, bruised, and covered with glue and feathers. This bruising slapstick set piece, which takes up a good chunk of the film's final third, had me roaring when I was twelve, but when I watched the film recently, I was surprised how those sequences kind of left me cold while the more sentimental material, such as Kevin's low-key conversation with the old man in a darkened church (a choral version of my father's favorite Christmas carol, "O Holy Night", provides the backdrop to this scene), reached out and embraced me from the screen. Even amidst pummeling sight gags and insult humor, Hughes's best moments always came when he allowed his characters to simply relate to one another, and Home Alone provides perhaps the most polarizing example of that truth.

Home Alone's success resulted in an increasingly tiresome string of films (most directed by surrogates; Hughes's last directing credit was 1991's Curly Sue) in which stickily sentimental plots were wedded, ever more awkwardly, to brutally cartoonish slapstick finales. A slobbery St. Bernard was the purveyor of the punishment in 1992's Beethoven (written by Hughes under his Dumasesque pseudonym of "Edmond Dantes"), while a whole herd of dogs provided the robber-ravaging services in 1996's 101 Dalmatians. Another beloved kids' classic was given the Hughes sentiment-followed-by-brutality treatment in 1993's Dennis the Menace, which nevertheless benefits from some real chemistry between Mason Gamble's Dennis and Walter Matthau's terrific Mr. Wilson. The kids just kept getting younger and younger, until it was a baby in 1994's Baby's Day Out (picture a live-action Road Runner cartoon with an oblivious infant as the Road Runner and three, you guessed it, stupid crooks as Wile E. Coyote) and then just some primordial ooze brutalizing bad guys in 1997's Flubber. It's hard to say if the success of Home Alone poisoned the creative well or if Hughes simply stopped caring, but by the time Flubber splattered off the assembly line, the words "Written by John Hughes" in the credits of a film were no longer such a harbinger of a good time at the movies. Following 1998's Reach the Rock, a barely-released melodrama he wrote and produced, Hughes largely went into reclusion, with "Edmond Dantes" receiving an occasional writing credit (his final credit was as co-scenarist on last year's Owen Wilson farce Drillbit Taylor).

Nevertheless, at his best, Hughes tapped into the heart of the mainstream audience as few American filmmakers have since. Very few contemporary screenwriters can rival Hughes for the sheer volume of quotable dialogue in his films. Lines like "Demented and sad, but social" (The Breakfast Club) and "Fred, she's gotten her boobies" (Sixteen Candles) have passed into the vernacular of my generation. Just two days before Hughes' death, at my day job, I addressed a long cash-register line thusly: "I can help someone right here? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?" And I don't think I had to explain to anyone in the place where that was coming from. When thinking about Hughes yesterday, I remembered that I had even gotten to briefly play one of his characters, as I portrayed none other than Ferris Bueller for a friend's Directing for Film class project. It was a great treat getting to deliver Hughes' dialogue and talking directly to the camera (I had particular fun with some hand gestures during Ferris's immortal "lump of coal" dialogue about Cameron). And it was Ferris that provided a line that showed up on the Facebook status quotes of many of my friends, including myself, yesterday, as a tribute to Mr. Hughes: "Life moves by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it."

Sound advice, sir. And don't worry. We won't forget about you.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #86

THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

The Writer

Michael Leeson; based on the novel by Warren Adler

Why It's Here

It is with a great sense of relief that I tell you that, unlike the last film on this countdown, The War of the Roses is not a picture that holds any personal resonance for me. Being a bachelor with only one relationship under my belt that's lasted longer than a year, I have no first-hand experience of either marriage or divorce, and the divorces I have witnessed at a remove, while certainly no walk in the park for anyone involved, were nowhere near as disastrous in their consequences as what befalls the title characters of this film. So The War of the Roses did not contribute much to the man I am. But the screenwriter I am owes a tremendous debt to the lessons imparted by Michael Leeson's brutal, no-holds-barred rendering of the spectacular flame-out of a singularly modern marriage. This is a film that taught me much about how to present an allegorical narrative on film, about how with the right cockeyed comic sensibility, one can draw laughter from events and ideas that, when one steps back and looks at them with a clear eye, are not really all that funny. Most of all, Leeson's film was an object lesson in finding the proper ending for your story, and an illustration of the truism that a happy ending and a satisfying ending are not always the same thing.

Like all great cautionary tales, The War of the Roses is narrated by an after-the-fact survivor of the carnage. Our storyteller in this case is Gavin D'Amoto (Danny DeVito, who also directed the picture), an attorney who, addressing a client on the verge of plunging into the choppy divorce-litigation waters, tells him the story of the Roses as a gauge of whether this man is truly ready for what lies ahead of him. An old friend of Gavin's, Harvard-bound law student Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas), meets his wife-to-be Barbara (Kathleen Turner) at an auction, when she outbids him on a sculpture of a Chinese homunculus. After a bout of noisy sex on the night they meet, Oliver and Barbara wed, she overseeing the household and raising their two children while Oliver climbs the ladder at his prestigious Washington law firm, eventually becoming a senior partner. His success allows them to purchase a gorgeous palace of a house that Barbara decorates herself, a monument to their rise into the social stratosphere and to their success as a couple. But the mansion that is their marriage has serious cracks in the foundation, and slowly but surely, the ground begins to shift under them. The troubles at first are slight but noticeable: Oliver's dismissive cutting off of Barbara as she rambles through a poorly told story at a business dinner, Barbara's defiance of Oliver's wishes by starting her own catering company. Finally, in the eighteenth year of their marriage, Barbara fails to show up at the hospital where Oliver has been rushed with an apparent heart attack (this turns out to be just a hiatal hernia). She realizes, to her surprise, that the news of his potential death made her happy, and she asks for a divorce. Oh, and she wants to keep the house. The house that she built into a home…with Oliver's money. He's not willing to give up what he believes is rightfully his, and thanks to an obscure law that Gavin discovers deep in his library, Oliver finds that he can still reside in the house while the divorce is going on. Oliver and Barbara move into separate quarters in their sprawling manse, and the divorce degenerates into a free-for-all of smashed furniture, shattered antiques and plummeting chandeliers. The battle of the sexes becomes a literal war, with the house as the prize and the devil take the hindmost.

Doesn't sound funny at all, does it? Divorce and the heartbreak and betrayal that lead up to it seldom are. But the brilliance of Leeson's script (adapted from Warren Adler's just-as-cutting but not-as-funny novel of the same name) is to take the genuine pain of a modern divorce, tweak it ever so slightly into the zone of surreal black comedy, and come out with a story that is more or less plausible and yet caustically funny at the same time. Many separating couples do horribly petty things to one another as revenge for the years lost to the failed marriage, and the Roses take that to the next level, with Oliver sawing the heels off of Barbara's stockpile of shoes and Barbara nailing the door of Oliver's basement sauna shut…with Oliver inside. Lots of couples are forced into awkward partitioning of assets, but few are as meticulous as the Roses, who actually whip out blueprints to portion off their house into colored quadrants (with a schoolboy grin, Oliver exults to Gavin, "I got more square footage!"). The embarrassing confrontations that often ensue in front of family and friends during a divorce are splendidly enacted here as Oliver arrives at a dinner party hosted by Barbara in a top hat and t-shirt, hocks a loogie into the soup, and pisses on the fish while it's still in the stove (when Barbara says she'd never embarrass Oliver like this, he shoots back, "You're not equipped to, honey"). The confrontations eventually turn physical, with both Roses taking their tumbles down their magnificent staircase and Oliver getting a tire iron upside the head, but Douglas and Turner are careful to play these vicious encounters as farce…though the bruises and cuts they leave sure look real enough.

This knockabout black-comic slapstick is ably supported by Leeson's forked-tongue dialogue exchanges, which display an admirable consistency of message as its characters spin out a relentlessly cynical take on love, the gender wars, and of course marriage. At first all seems hunky dory for the Roses; when Barbara presents a struggling young Oliver with the gift of an antique Morgan automobile, she asks him if he's happy. "No, I'm way past happy," he replies. "I'm married!" This is one of the very few times in the film that marriage is discussed with any unironic idealism. (It's also telling that Leeson declines to show us the Roses' wedding, the moment of one's life when love and togetherness are customarily showcased in their most unabashedly romanticized form.) From then on, things degenerate, and Leeson's words chart the downward spiral. When Oliver's in the hospital with his hernia attack, he finds himself on a gurney next to a large man (Prince Hughes) who explains his bleeding wound: "My wife stabbed me in the stomach. With a nail file this time. She's training to be a manicurist. They make good money, you know?" When the divorce is underway in earnest, Leeson has Oliver and Barbara throw words like "honey bun" and "sweetie" at each other like poisoned daggers, and their barbs frequently hit each other's most vulnerable spots. When Oliver tells Barbara she'd better get a good divorce lawyer, she replies, "Best your money can buy!" Oliver likewise attacks Barbara's sense of womanhood by positing that before she met him, she wasn't even multi-orgasmic. As the story's Greek chorus and as a divorce attorney accustomed to seeing formerly-in-love couples at their absolute worst, Gavin is unsurprisingly the source of many of Leeson's most brutal observations. When Oliver, after a nasty confrontation with Barbara, asks her, "What the hell is wrong with you?", cut to Gavin: "If you're with a woman for any length of time, sooner or later you'll ask her that question." As the divorce continues to degenerate into a living nightmare, Gavin tells Oliver to "never underestimate [Barbara] as an adversary", and reminds him that his father, who is frequently invoked by Gavin as a font of worldly wisdom (most of it cynical), always said "a man will never outdo a woman when it comes to love or revenge." (It must be noted here that, unsurprisingly for a film written and directed by men, The War of the Roses seems to have a largely male sensibility; though Barbara is a strong character with her own point of view, she's up against two equally powerful male perspectives, Gavin's and Oliver's, with no one to really back her up except Susan [Marianne Sagebrecht], the Roses' sweet but weak-willed housekeeper.) And though himself recently married, in naked defiance of everything he's learned about such unions, Gavin's view of divorce is still bleak; he says "a civilized divorce is a contradiction in terms", and that there is no winner in such a confrontation, "there's only degrees of losing."

Even the words of pure, unadulterated affection we share with our loved ones can be used against us, as Oliver learns when his hernia attack hits. In the hospital, believing he's on his deathbed, he writes an unflinchingly honest letter to his wife, in which he tells her, "All I am and all I have I owe to you." Barbara eventually turns this letter over to her divorce attorney (G.D. Spradlin), who uses this statement as the primary grounds for Barbara's claim to the house. It's this moment that cements Oliver's resolve to keep the house against all odds; he tells Barbara, "By showing your attorney this letter, you have sunk lower than the lowest layer of prehistoric frog shit at the bottom of a New Jersey scum swamp." The War of the Roses relentlessly harnesses the cruelest impulses of human nature and hurls them at our funny bone, frequently striking the target with great success. I first saw this movie when I was about thirteen years old, and it had a tremendous impact on my developing sense of humor. I have often been accused, in both my writing and in day-to-day conversation, of being someone whose sense of humor knows no bounds of decency or sense, of being the guy who can effortlessly send a joke careening over the line. That may be true, but in my defense, I learned it from Oliver and Barbara Rose…who learned it from Michael Leeson.

Another important lesson I learned from Leeson is that your screenplay is going to work much better if it's driven by two opposed but equally justifiable forces. The War of the Roses is a true war of equals, and Leeson is careful to give each of them a distinct voice and a clear approach to their conflict. Barbara is the principal instigator of the split-up, and to be honest, her reasons at first seem pretty flimsy. To our knowledge, Oliver has never cheated on her, he doesn't drink to excess or abuse drugs, he's a reasonably attentive father to his children, he's paid for a beautiful house and allowed her to turn it into a fabulous home. But there are a lot of big problems with him, too, and just as many little ones. He's a man who will frequently put his career ambitions ahead of familial harmony, interrupting Barbara's poor storytelling at the dinner table and shunting his overweight kids off to bed before they threaten to embarrass him in front of his firm's senior partners. He is extremely condescending with regard to Barbara's professional ambitions. When she tells him about how she sold a pound of pate to a friend for $35 and how she plans to buy an expensive 4X4 truck, he sneers, "Well, you only have to sell 700 more pounds of pate." (He gets his comeuppance for this crack later, when Barbara drives that big truck right over his beloved Morgan…once again, with him in it.) He blows off reading a "little contract" she received from a catering client, and once he's finally got it in hand, he uses it to smash an annoying fly. And there's his noisy rattling of silverware. And his phony laugh. And his snoring. It all builds up until she can't take it anymore, and she finally tells him, "When I watch you eat, when I see you asleep, when I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in." This being the film it is, he encourages her to do just this…and she does….and he replies through bloody lips, "Next time, I hit back." Many people (most of them men, I would guess) would look at Barbara's rationale for leaving Oliver and think it's much ado about nothing. But that's looking without really seeing, and when you break it down, Leeson is quite sympathetic to Barbara's case.

But that doesn't mean Oliver can't have his say as well, and Leeson makes it very clear that he's the one who has the most to lose emotionally by the end of the marriage. Leeson frequently lets us know, through his actions and words, that for all the vitriol he eventually musters up and cold-eyed calculation he displays in his battles with Barbara, Oliver is still a man very much in love, and he's fighting as much to win back his beloved as to keep his house. (Gavin expresses Oliver and Barbara's opposed positions on the divorce in a tidy statement of "two dilemmas that rattle the human skull…how do you hold on to someone who won't stay, and how do you get rid of someone who won't go?") It's no accident that Oliver's first action when he believes he is dying is to write a letter to his wife, and it's telling that his greatest moment of hurt in the picture comes when she uses this letter as a weapon in their divorce proceedings. When Barbara calls a meeting in their dining room to discuss their next moves, Oliver sees this as a potential reconciliation, and shows up with a bottle of wine in hand. He flat-out admits that he still wants her and still loves her, even when he's swinging a tire iron at her head, even when they find themselves hanging together from their precariously swaying foyer chandelier. And there are imperceptible but vivid moments indicating that Barbara may even have her doubts, too. Having tracked Barbara to the attic, Oliver begins an assault that seems at first uncomfortably like it's going to turn into rape, until Barbara seemingly succumbs to his advances. This blows up in Oliver's face, though, when Barbara goes down on him…and bites "the bald avenger", hard. Later, though, when they're trapped on the chandelier, and Oliver admits that he still loves Barbara, he follows with, "And deep down, you know that you still love me, too." And if you look away from the screen, you'll miss it, but there's just the smallest bit of a nod from Barbara. In The War of the Roses, everyone has their say and their reasons, and those reasons are never black and white.

All this makes The War of the Roses sound like it's a film about love and marriage. But this film was made in the 1980s, and like most things from the Greed Decade, it's really about money, a story about people who define themselves by their possessions and are eventually destroyed by them. Gavin tells us that his father always said that four things show the world who a man is: "His house, his car, his wife, and his shoes," the wife notably being lumped in as just another possession. As Oliver and Barbara's story tells us, not much has changed since Gavin's father's day. Oliver and Barbara don't meet by running into each other on a street corner; they battle for possession of a figurine at an auction, and the first words they exchange are about the trinket's cash value. This sets the stage for Oliver and Barbara's entire relationship, a relationship that plays out in a world in which people are brought to great heights and reduced to rubble by their stuff. Early in the marriage, Barbara expresses her affection to her family primarily with gifts; she brings home sweets for the kids and buys Oliver an expensive antique car for Christmas. The source of the earliest rift in Barbara and Oliver's relationship is a set of Baccarat crystal goblets that they picked up cheap from a man who had been buying them as an anniversary present for his wife…who he found out was divorcing him before the glasses were ready for purchase. The Roses' home is the possession that most clearly defines their marriage to the world and to themselves, and so it's no surprise that it is their mutual unwillingness to relinquish that house that sets the stage for the bloodbath that ensues. Their principal weapons in this war are, of course, their treasured goods, from kitchen appliances to antique figurines to Barbara's beloved shoes. Finally, after he has boarded up the windows and doors so neither of them can escape their prison-home, Oliver brings to Barbara the Chinese figurine that first brought them together. "You say it's mine," he tells her, "and you can have everything in this house." She replies, "All right. It's mine." Neither will budge, and when Barbara finds herself desperately dangling upside down from the chandelier, Oliver delivers a final verbal twist of the knife: "I'd be happy to help you. In exchange for the house." The 1980s drew to a close amid the fallout of scandals swirling around the convergence of business and politics, the big-money Washington world the Roses call home; it was the era of Michael Milken, Iran-Contra, the Silverado scandal, the Keating Five, all capped off with a record-setting stock-market drop and four subsequent years of economic recession. It was also a time when I was first learning how to really watch a film, and The War of the Roses was a picture that taught me that a film could be about a lot more than just its story. Leeson's film is essentially a black-comic eulogy for the 1980s, a story about smug, overprivileged people who are literally willing to kill each other rather than give up their stuff.

And I am not using the word "literally" as an exaggeration here. Barbara and Oliver Rose indeed pay for their hubris and greed with their lives. Their war lands them both on their precariously balanced chandelier and, before Gavin and Susan can bust down the door with a ladder, the chandelier plummets to the floor, killing them both. Naturally, before they expire, the still-hopeful Oliver puts his hand on Barbara's shoulder. Naturally, the unrepentant Barbara shoves it away. Ha ha ha. I remember watching The War of the Roses with my mother, who was appalled that a movie calling itself a comedy could have such a "sad" ending. But I learned from watching The War of the Roses that a film's ending does not necessarily have to result in sunshine and flowers for all the players, as long as that ending results in the fitting outcome to the events that have gone before. Can you imagine, after all that Barbara and Oliver have inflicted on each other and themselves, a finale where they reconcile and resolve to build a new and better life together? It would be like Rick and Ilsa staying together at the end of Casablanca. Happy on the surface, deeply unsatisfying from a storytelling perspective. The War of the Roses taught this budding screenwriter not to be afraid of taking your story down unpleasant paths, of giving your characters the shaft in the end, if the dictates of your story demand that it be so. After all, audiences are more sophisticated in their understanding of narrative than they are often given credit for, and can frequently distinguish between what is right for the story and what is merely "happy". And my guess is that with Barbara and Oliver back together at the end, the film would have been roundly rejected by audiences, instead of becoming the minor holiday-season hit that it was.

The ending is not total doom and gloom, however. Gavin seems happy in his newfound marriage, and the Roses' bleak tale encourages his client to go home and give his estranged wife another chance. But I've read some speculation on the Internet Movie Database's message board that the Roses were not even real, that Gavin just made up their story to dissuade his client from the dark divorce path ahead (a theory supported by Gavin's presence as an essentially unreliable narrator who tells us of many events he had no first-hand knowledge of and some he couldn't have known, such as the Roses' final words to each other). Even if this is the case, it is in itself a further vindication of Leeson's storytelling, as even his characters understand the occasional value of a story with a tragic ending. We can look at the Roses and say, there but for the grace of God go we. I for one know that, if and when I ever do get married, I'll do my best to avoid the mistakes Barbara and Oliver Rose made. The War of the Roses is not a film that has shaped the man I am. But I hope it will have a positive effect on the man, the husband, I may someday become.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (BOLDFACE INDICATES A WIN): BAFTA Award, Best Adapted Screenplay