Stream On: Home for the holidays, on ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’
John Hughes’ 1987 road-trip comedy is a Thanksgiving tradition for me.
A little bit of John Hughes goes a long way with me, probably because when he started out with his “teen films,” I was no longer a teenager. But I love his outlier, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I reckon you won’t read about any of his other films in this column, but Hughes’ 1987 road-trip comedy is a Thanksgiving tradition for me.
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES
/Streaming /Amazon /😎92%😌87% /Trailer /1987 /R
Neal Page (Steve Martin, Pennies from Heaven) is an advertising executive on a business trip in New York City, eager to return to his family in Chicago two days before Thanksgiving. After a late-running business meeting with an indecisive client, Neal tries to hail a cab during rush hour. While he’s bribing a man to let him have a cab that the other has hailed, a third party takes it, leaving behind two shower curtain-rings in the street.
Neal arrives at the airport just as his flight is delayed. While waiting, he meets Del Griffith (John Candy, The Silent Partner), an overly talkative ... shower curtain-ring salesman. To his dismay, Neal is assigned a seat next to the plus-sized Del on a crowded flight to O'Hare International Airport.
Director/writer Hughes said he was inspired to write the film's story after an actual flight he was on from New York to Chicago. The flight was diverted to Wichita, Kansas, taking him five days to get home. That’s but one wrinkle introduced in Neal and Del’s three-day odyssey of misadventures trying to reach Chicago in time for Thanksgiving Day. A blizzard in Chicago diverts Neal and Del’s plane to Wichita, where Neal and Del must stay overnight. Forced to share the last available room, Neal loses his temper over Del's irritating behavior.
The next day, with air travel prohibitively delayed, Neal buys them both train tickets to Chicago. However, the locomotive breaks down near Jefferson City, Missouri, stranding its passengers in a field. Alas, Neal takes pity on Del, who is struggling with his trunk, and they reunite, traveling on a crowded bus to St. Louis. Then Neal offends Del by suggesting that they go their own directions, and they again part ways.
At the St. Louis Airport, Neal attempts to rent a car, but it is missing when he gets to the lot. He attempts to book a taxi to Chicago and insults a dispatcher, who punches him in the face. By chance, Del arrives at the scene in his own rental car.
Neal is not inherently a nice guy, and Del, who is larger than life and as friendly as a dog, grates on Neal’s nerves almost constantly. Steve Martin proved to my satisfaction in 1981 that he can act dramatically. Here he is a perfect straight man to John Candy’s wild Del, Candy excellent as always, in spite of (or because of) quirks of his own. (Before shooting, Candy arrived with exercise equipment for him to use during production. He had crews install a treadmill, bench press, weights, and other exercise gear in his hotel suite. Steve Martin said Candy never used any of it.)
The movie opened in American theaters on November 25, 1987 (the day before Thanksgiving), and finished third for the weekend, grossing $7,009,482. The movie finished its 12-week American run on January 22, 1988, with $49,530,280 against a production budget of $15 million. Planes, Trains and Automobiles marked a widely noticed change in the repertoire of John Hughes, generally considered a teen-angst filmmaker at the time. It was greeted with critical acclaim upon release, in particular receiving two thumbs up from Siskel & Ebert, with Gene Siskel declaring it Candy's best role to date. The film was featured in Roger Ebert's “Great Movies” collection, Ebert writing that it “is perfectly cast and soundly constructed.”
Sources include Wikipedia (WP:CCBYSA); IMDb.com; Box-Office Mojo; Screen Rant; and RogerEbert.com.
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.