Panel from issue #6 of Mystery in Space comic book, 1957
Director John Hughes passed away this week from a heart attack during a visit to Manhattan. He is already being called the Salinger of the '80s - that's a terrible idea, in my opinion, but it's not hard to see where the sentiment is coming from. Like Salinger, Hughes wrote a set of movies (and directed some of them) that captured and made a connection to the intensity of teenage feeling without condescending to it. In fact, at times Hughes managed to elevate teen angst into something pretty beautiful, and he will always be identified with these moments from movies like Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, and Some Kind of Wonderful. His films were not without their flaws - there is some "class" weirdness going on in most of these movies (what is up with Cameron Frye's house, for instance?), but that never registered with me when I loved these movies as a kid.
Hughes was also a talented National Lampoon humorist and wrote many excellent scripts outside his canonized teen movies. His greatest work may actually be writing the scripts of Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, all movies that came after his perceived artistic peak. His financial peak came later, of course, with Home Alone, an experiment in writing very broad family humor that included "jokes" like a barefooted man impaling his foot on a rusty nail and then walking through broken glass, as well as a person receiving severe burns to his scalp from a blowtorch. Sadly, Hughes took the success of this movie to heart and focused his later work on things he thought his kids would enjoy, line Beethoven and Curly Sue.
Hughes' use of music in movies always impressed me, particularly when he directed his own scripts. I probably heard the Smiths and Psychedelic Furs for the first time in John Hughes movies, and his use of songs like Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)", Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work", and the Beatles' "Twist and Shout" make for very memorable music-based sequences in his films. His commitment to using "college rock" in his movies made for some pretty good soundtracks as well, like the inclusion of "The Hardest Walk" by the Jesus and Mary Chain on the soundtrack of Some Kind of Wonderful. 2009 is not being a good year for me when it comes to pieces of my childhood slipping away forever. I'm going to go watch something with Molly Ringwald in it.
"The Hardest Walk" by the Jesus and Mary Chain
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