Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – 4K Ultra HD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I often begin these autopsies of John Hughes’s oeuvre by regurgitating some lore about how the film in question came to be. In the case of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I want to correct a faux pas I made on Twitter. “I find it fascinating,” I tweeted, “that in test screenings they all hated Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend and John Hughes figured out it was because of one line where she criticizes him. They cut it and her likability quotient skyrocketed.” (“Fascinating and depressing,” I added in a follow-up.) In actuality, the line had nothing to do with Ferris’s girlfriend cutting him down to size. I should’ve refreshed my memory of the incident beforehand, say by rereading this passage from A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away (reviewed here), the 2019 memoir by the movie’s editor, Paul Hirsch:

We prepared to screen the picture for an audience again. We wanted to see if our adjustments would make a difference. They did, and the scores went up significantly. Women in particular scored it much higher, perhaps due to the removal of a line from Sloane that they found offensive. In the parade scene, she and Cameron are talking about life after high school.

SLOANE: The future’s worse for a boy, isn’t it?
Cameron doesn’t understand what she means.
SLOANE: A girl can always bail out and have a baby and get some guy to support her.

When the second preview scored much higher, the studio thought it was due to removing the offensive line. I thought it was because we had restructured the day to have the parade come last. John thought it was because we changed the music in the museum scene. Because we had done all three at the same time, it was impossible to know, but the cut played well, and we were ready to lock picture.

First of all, good riddance to that line. Yes, it’s glib in that teenage way, but it’s too seasoned in its cynicism. Too macho. It reads like a man writing for a teenage girl. (To Hughes’s credit, this is rarely the case.) Nor does it suit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off‘s aesthetic, if dialogue can be said to be aesthetic. As for that tweet, I was glad when it struck a nerve and spurred a conversation about how we deprive women, real and fictional alike, of their agency, but I regret that it did so under false pretenses. Something valuable did come out of it, in that I inadvertently held a referendum on the fashionableness of the film and its title character–something I’d been curious about. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was the ninth-highest-grossing movie of 1986 and the seventh-most-rented tape of 1987 (beating “Crocodile” Dundee, a massive hit that had bested it at the box office). Countless rip-offs (“Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”), tributes (the bands Save Ferris and Rooney, Canadian artist Sarah Keenlyside’s touring recreation of Ferris’s bedroom), and homages (commercials for cars and pizza, an episode of “The Goldbergs”) have cropped up over the 38 years since its release, during which Paramount has never let it go out of circulation. Why, then, do I feel almost guilty about that star rating at the top of this review?

***

The story goes that Hughes was having a meeting at his house with director Howard Deutch to discuss the screenplay for Pretty in Pink when he excused himself and returned hours later with the first pages of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, written in a flurry of inspiration. Paramount, his new home base after a falling-out with Universal Pictures, greenlit it the next day. Purportedly, Hughes envisioned Anthony Michael Hall in the title role, but they’d made three pictures together–four if you count the Hughes-scripted National Lampoon’s Vacation–and Hall was hungry for new experiences with different directors. (Hughes subsequently ghosted Hall and Molly Ringwald, who’d likewise expressed to Hughes a desire to sow her wild oats.) Hall was so familiar as Hughes’s go-to geek that casting him as the slick, suave Bueller might’ve been a bridge too far for audiences anyway. Hughes needed someone highly ingratiating to fill Ferris’s shoes, and for that reason vigorously pursued Matthew Broderick, less for his film work–although he was Breakfast Club-adjacent, having starred with Ally Sheedy in WarGames–than for his experience addressing the audience as Neil Simon surrogate Eugene Jerome on Broadway. Broderick was wary of playing a teenager again at the ripe old age of 23 and doubtful the fourth wall could be broken on film, so Hughes screened Alfie for him, in which a womanizing chauffeur (Michael Caine) famously waxes philosophic directly to the camera, mostly about “birds.” The actor’s misgivings instantly melted away.

Alfie‘s influence on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is palpable.[i] I suspect careful study of it led to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off becoming the sole John Hughes film in widescreen–the proscenium-like shape a better fit for their protagonists’ stagy asides. Alfie and Ferris are mutually possessed of a casual self-assurance that goes hand-in-hand with a worldly cynicism, though the older Alfie is a hardened misogynist and, it should be said, slightly more tethered to the laws of reality. Ferris is the ne plus ultra of Hughes’s outsider heroes by virtue of his extreme far-fetchedness: a teenager without angst, one who’s wildly popular despite having none of the traditional markers of high-school royalty. He isn’t, that we can see, a jock or a musician, and he isn’t a Bad Boy. He’s in a lower tax bracket than his best friend. He’s no gangster, either, garnering respect through intimidation or crass exploitation of the pecking order. Ferris does allegedly perform favours for people (“Ferris Bueller, you know him?” one student asks another, who replies, “Yeah! He’s getting me out of summer school!”), but I can’t help thinking this is more spin than modus operandi. “The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude,” says school secretary Grace (Edie McClurg). His appeal is almost Christ-like–as word of his “illness” spreads, “Jesus Saves” becomes “Save Ferris,” a phrase that crops up on a water tower[ii] and the marquee at Wrigley Field–and similarly broad: When Mrs. Bueller (Cindy Pickett) picks up daughter Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) from the police station, both a cop (Robert Kim) and a criminal (Charlie Sheen) speak warmly of Ferris.

This Brundlefly fusion of Alfie Elkins and Jesus Christ, filtered through Hughes’s light postmodernism, yields Bugs Bunny, for the most part. Ferris Bueller is a magic stinker philosopher king, all mischief and platitudes, and the world is his oyster. His wardrobe seems to change a half-dozen times in the first third of the film, depending on his internal narrative, and he can conjure accessories (a beret here, a rabbit’s foot there) on a whim. Not getting caught playing hooky, which would jeopardize his scholastic career and shatter his parents’ illusions of their perfect son, is of utmost importance to Ferris, but this doesn’t stop him from performing in a parade before the entire city, or backtracking while racing home to introduce himself to a couple of cuties sunbathing in their backyard, because he knows the odds are perpetually stacked in his favour. I’m struck by a moment in the opening scene where he pretends his vision is so impaired that he can’t see Jeanie, and a cut to his P.O.V. ‘proves it’ by going in and out of focus: Like Bugs, Ferris is hero and author, capable of getting the camera itself to do his bidding. (Later, he introduces himself Bond-style–“Bueller, Ferris Bueller”–and the soundtrack chimes in with a swingin’ jazz lick.) Broderick’s hodgepodge of New York accents and shit-eating grin are the cherry on top that completes the toon-ification of Ferris.

Ferris does have an antecedent in the Hughes canon, in function if not form: Lisa, the trickster goddess Frankenstein-ed to life in Weird Science. Although he lacks her omnipotence, the reach of his influence is no less formidable, and like Lisa, he is there to impart lessons, not to learn any of his own. I can’t help wondering if Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is Hughes reclaiming the core premise of Weird Science, a film he made under duress, from faddish detours into smut and special effects. His stroke of genius when rewriting Pretty in Pink as Some Kind of Wonderful was to do it as a boy movie, and here it’s to give the Lisa figure an anti-Lisa, whom we’ll get to momentarily. It’s Hughes realizing Superman is dull without a Lex Luthor and that, in the absence of a dramatic arc, Ferris needs to clear a goalpost of some kind–in this case, the vanquishing of a foe–to mark the end of his journey. Changing Lisa from the private sex genie of two horny geeks into virtually anything else also looks wise in the rearview, as Weird Science is an embarrassing relic of ’80s sexual mores, whether or not it delivers on its exploitative premise. (It doesn’t.) Yet making her this gifted high-schooler has borne out as a lateral move: In taking away Lisa’s supernatural powers, suddenly what was conjured via fantasy logic must now be coerced. That’s problematic when applied to a white kid from the suburbs.

***

I had an epiphany after writing the above. Ferris may be a rash corrective to Lisa, but there are Ferrises littered throughout Hughes’s filmography. The root of Ferris’s unlikelihood is that Hughes has written one of his preppie creeps as the good-guy protagonist. Otherwise, his filmography is littered with Ferris Buellers living the same charmed life, having figured out the system is rigged in their favour. As the double standard that exists for the so-called one-percenters has come clearer into focus, Ferris has become harder to embrace, to cheer on, to live through vicariously. He’s built on a rotten core. FFC’s own Walter Chaw told me that Bueller reminded him of all the people in high school he “resented having to like,” which got me thinking about the many hilarious sycophants we meet over the course of the picture. I’d always taken their hyperbolic idolization of Ferris at face value, as one of Hughes’s trademark swerves into the territory of absurdism. It was a joke my best friend Josh and I poached for a mockumentary we made in high school about said best friend being such a rock star that the vice principal waxes his car. I never stopped to consider the gag was only recyclable because Josh was a tall, handsome guy who lived in palatial digs and drove a Ford Falcon convertible. (These were true-to-life details that would’ve made him more popular offscreen if not for me cramping his style.) He, too, was a benevolent figure in the film, but a benevolent Anthony Fremont is still Anthony Fremont. While I realize this is the very definition of overthinking it, how many people are disciples of Ferris because the alternative is social death? (Note that Jeanie is verbally attacked when she spurns the Save Ferris movement.) Hero worship upsets ecosystems, no matter how actively toxic the hero.

And Ferris is undeniably toxic. He’s a spoiled brat used to getting his way. The one time he didn’t, i.e., when his parents gave him a computer instead of a car for his sixteenth birthday, is something he harps on obsessively. Does he drag his supposedly ailing best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) out of bed just because Cameron has a car? I must admit, I’ve never thought this cynically about Ferris before. But when Cameron screws up in a fake phone call to get Ferris’s girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) out of school by telling Principal Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) to wait with her at the pickup, and Ferris says now we’ll have to steal your dad’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder, because Rooney would never believe Sloane’s dad drives your “piece of shit,” is there any doubt that Ferris intended to weasel the Ferrari out of Cameron all along? The Fryes are plainly wealthier than the Buellers, but Cameron’s privilege finds him playing host to the parasitic Ferris–a fate he has chosen or accepted because he is starved of attention at home. Accustomed to exploiting weaknesses in the system, our hero has naturally started treating individuals like the system. Any obstruction to his satisfaction is the same and must be conquered.

I’ve wrestled for a long time with Ferris and Cameron’s friendship. Specifically, is Ferris a good or bad friend to Cameron–or, more to the point, how bad a friend is he? Cameron is depressed. Because this is a comedy, it’s a palatable, rudimentary depression, almost “Peanuts”-like in its vague precociousness. (Ruck’s hangdog posturing is rather Charlie Brown-like.) Hughes, however, was not in the habit of trivializing teen angst, and he takes pains to show us that Cameron is with his friends in body but not always in spirit. With a fear of the Ferrari getting damaged hanging over him like the Sword of Damocles, he’s fixated on his father, the fount of his torment. On the observation deck of the Sears Tower[iii], Ferris instructs Sloane and Cameron to rest their forehead against the window and gaze down at the street below. “The city looks so peaceful from up here,” Sloane says. “I think I see my dad,” Cameron says. It is not peaceful in his head. Later, Ferris semi-facetiously proposes to the ravishing Sloane at the Chicago Board of Trade (a.k.a., the stock exchange). She strikes him down. He asks for one good reason, and Cameron butts in: “Look at my mother and father, they hate each other.” “So what?” Ferris snipes. Cameron is reaching out, but all Ferris hears is a cockblock.

In the picture’s most justly celebrated sequence, the trio visits the Art Institute of Chicago. There, they join hands with a group of schoolchildren on a field trip, pose with furrowed brows and crossed arms in imitation of Rodin’s Portrait of Balzac[iv], and admire the Picassos. Then they splinter off: Ferris and Sloane share what feels like a moonlight kiss, dwarfed and silhouetted as they are by Marc Chagall’s stained-glass installation America Windows; and Cameron stands hypnotized before George Seurat’s pointillist/neoimpressionist masterwork, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It’s a wordless montage set to Dream Academy‘s unbearably lovely instrumental cover of The Smiths‘ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”[v] that ends with Hirsch cutting back and forth between closer and closer views of Cameron and the little girl in white at the centre of the painting until the girl’s expression becomes unsettling in its distinct indistinctness. More jump cuts bring us so microscopically close to the canvas that we’re seeing individual dots of colour.

The scene is meaningful for art aficionados. “It almost brings me to tears,” Smithsonian curator Eleanor Harvey told SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, “because he’s having a soul-wrenching, life changing experience. When he comes out of that painting, he will not be the same.” She believes that Cameron’s Stendhal-ish reaction to the piece “in some weird way gives him the courage to understand that he can stand up for himself.” Judging by his DVD commentary from February 1999, John Hughes’s intentions were comparatively grim: “The closer he looks at the child, the less he sees with this style of painting. The more he looks at it there’s nothing there. He fears that the more you look at him there isn’t anything to see. There’s nothing there. That’s him.” That’s something Thomas Harris might write about a fledgling serial killer, so describing Cameron like this in the months leading up to Columbine is, needless to say, loaded, even prescient. John Cusack famously disparaged Hughes’s teen movies for their absence of “doom,” but there’s an apocalypse brewing in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club (the Brain is in detention for bringing a (flare) gun to school) that is merely pre-empted by story’s end, bound to recover its momentum in the post-narrative future.

It’s an artist’s prerogative to continue mentally sculpting long after the clay has dried, but I would sooner apply Hughes’s comments to Ferris than to Cameron. In a posthumous VANITY FAIR profile, David Kamp was surprised to hear Hughes liken himself to Bueller in one of the movie’s DVD featurettes–making Hughes’s remarks, potentially, a confession by way of projection. But one armchair psychoanalysis at a time. My take on Cameron’s momentary captivation with the painting is prosaic at best: On one level, he’s identifying with the child in the painting, the only figure breaking the fourth wall (ignoring that Ferris does the same)–the only one staring directly at us while everybody else’s attention is focused on the Seine. Maybe it’s a cry for help, like Cameron’s hypochondria; maybe she’s incapable of assimilating, of going with the flow–again, like Cameron, who’s too neurotic to enjoy painting the town red with Ferris and Sloane. The scene additionally mirrors Cameron’s POV from the Sears Tower. The altitude there made it impossible to see people’s individuality, while Seurat’s pointillism suggests that people are no easier to make out up close. It’s not that there’s nothing there, it’s that there’s so much there, coalescing into an image that tells the wrong story, or half the story. A girl in the park. A boy doing the Band of Outsiders thing with his friends. It’s why Ferris is incredulous when he asks Cameron (rhetorically) what they’ve seen on their day off and Cameron replies, “Nothing good.” Ferris thinks he can will Cameron towards contentment. He’s blind to the dots.

Being convinced of the potency of his own elixirs doesn’t automatically mean Ferris is a bad friend, just a privileged one. He’s a fairly typical teen in that respect, certainly fairly archetypical of teen cinema, though this character is usually second-fiddle, the lead’s party-happy best friend (you know the type: sunglasses and ironic T-shirts). This is an aspect of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that resonates with me from a disability standpoint: Well-meaning able-bodied friends talking to me like Wizard from Taxi Driver–”You got a lawyer. Another guy’s a doctor. Another guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born[…] Don’t worry so much!”–whenever our fundamental differences are thrown into stark, unpleasant relief. Then, before I know it, I’m apologizing for their discomfort.[vi] Ferris, I would say, is at a crossroads in this picture: Others hang on his every word, but he hasn’t really lived. Either people need to stop cooing over him, or he needs to taste pain. Failure. Shame.

In his clumsy way, Ferris does bring about a spectacular catharsis for Cameron, who “[dents] the shit out of” the Ferrari–his every violent kick of the fender aimed squarely at his old man–before accidentally knocking it off its perch in their glass garage, sending it hurtling into the forest clearing below. Ferris volunteers to take the heat (and I believe he would), but Cameron refuses. “When Morris comes home, he and I will just have a little chat,” Cameron says. He’s visibly lighter. Straighter. A smile is blooming on his face. Ira Newborn’s score butts in for the first time in this sequence (which had, until this point, unfolded to the nervous, low-frequency hum of the car running in place). This is where the film and Ferris leave Cameron, the upbeat music feigning closure when we know it’s the calm before the storm. My hope is that when Cameron shows up for school the next morning black-and-blue, or is placed on suicide watch, it will humble Ferris. If, by some miracle, Morris forgives and embraces his son, and they all go out for ice cream afterwards, thus confirming the divine providence of Ferris’s bullshit, then Ferris’s insufferability may no longer know any bounds.

***

Ferris has two enemies in the film: his sister Jeanie, who is sick of everyone buying Ferris’s act; and the principal, Edward R. Rooney, who is determined to hold Ferris back a year for chronic truancy. Both are more sympathetic now that we’re neck-deep in the grifter-chic post-accountability era, although they spend the movie shadowboxing someone who is at most dimly aware of their existence. Hughes is perhaps allegorizing his cultish fame in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He is Ferris looking down from the observation deck, unable to distinguish supporters from detractors. They are the masses. And the distinction is meaningless besides, inasmuch as it’s an ego boost to have people obsessing over you, whatever the nature of it. Ferris had more than one sibling in the shooting script; so many characters and subplots sloughed themselves off in the editing room[vii], but Jeanie persevered, which is poignant. To others, Jeanie’s tilting at windmills, but she’s confronting the very real obstacles of favouritism and sexism in challenging the ascension of what she knows firsthand is a mediocre white man.[viii] It’s not unrelated that Jeanie has a lot of appealing qualities. With her peach bomber jacket and black skinny jeans, she has an effortless style that stands in contrast to Sloane’s calculated trendsetting. And she’s funny–funnier than Ferris, albeit in a more defensive, acerbic way. If she can lasso the bitterness, she has the type of charisma that will draw people to her cause like a tractor beam. (We see it in action when she attracts Charlie Sheen’s delinquent at the police station.) She’s the real star of this show, and she knows it, and the film knows it. That she has an arc and Ferris doesn’t–one that involves her rescuing him and defeating his enemy (Rooney) like the proverbial white knight–feels like tacit acknowledgment of this.

Rooney is a more conventional foil for Ferris: the Wile E. Coyote to his Road Runner–or, to extend an earlier analogy, his Bugs Bunny, like in the one where Bugs filled in for the Road Runner.[ix] Rooney scours the city for Ferris, eventually breaking into the Bueller home. As Jeanie’s obsession with Ferris has simultaneously led her to the same place, it does not go well for him. The Rooney parts are integral to the ebb and flow of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, lending forward drive and nominal suspense to one of Hughes’s lyrical plots…and I hate them. I didn’t always hate them, but familiarity has bred contempt. They’re old-timey slapstick–old-old-timey, staged in something like real-time with the formal strategies of Mack Sennett. (Think pratfalls filmed at a distance and emphatic close-up inserts.) I can only watch a man get his penny loafer stuck in the mud–Hughes confesses to a weakness for shoe humour in his commentary track–and rinse it off with a garden hose so many times before falling into a low-key fugue state. (Hughes and Hirsch would milk laughs from trying our patience more fruitfully in Planes, Trains & Automobiles with Steve Martin’s treacherous trek down a highway and across a runway.) The Rooney parts are also where cartoonish violence first rears its head in Hughes’s work: I have a hunch the Hughes-produced Home Alone is born in the Buellers’ kitchen when Jeanie kicks Rooney one, two, three times in the face and sprints upstairs as he topples to the ground. (Watch as Jeanie previews Kevin McCallister’s Scream face.) Admittedly, it’s a virtuoso moment–for Hirsch and Grey, in particular–and audacious in context while demonstrating Hughes’s unique ability to make these tonal swerves, to mix comic modes and indulge an expressionism latent in his style, and have the movie’s reality, such as it is, spring right back into place. But the scene undoubtedly marks an inflection point–or infection point–in Hughes’s filmography. He’d get carried away with this Three Stooges sadism, the raison d’être of Home Alone, a movie that outgrossed everything he had directed or produced to that point by a significant margin. For Hughes, who was mindful of audience feedback, this confirmed he should continue on in that vein.

What redeems the Rooney B-story is the brilliant closing-credits sequence, wherein a dishevelled, defeated Rooney reluctantly hitches a ride with a passing school bus. Though the passengers greet him with deferential silence, the mixture of wide eyes and slack jaws speaks volumes: they are witnessing an emperor without clothes. Rooney takes the last empty seat, a buffer spot between a weird girl in Coke-bottle specs (Polly Noonan, who later posed with her car for the cover of The Lemonheads‘ “It’s a Shame About Ray”) and the rest of the bus. She stares at him unself-consciously, wipes her nose, offers him a gummi bear. (“They’ve been in my pocket. They’re real warm and soft.”) Rooney tosses it and notices some choice graffiti: “Rooney Eats It.” The whole thing unfurls to the movie’s second unofficial theme song, Yello‘s house classic “Oh Yeah,” which has gone from giving voice to the Ferrari’s sex appeal to mocking Rooney’s mode of transportation. It’s at once a gratifying comeuppance for Rooney, who’s earned the schadenfreude with his stalking and his assault on the Buellers’ guard dog, and a comedic riff on both quotidian school life and the social partitions between students and educators, one that practically couldn’t exist in any other context.

There’s no sense in denying this: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is easily my most-watched John Hughes movie–and one of my most-watched movies, period. I could possibly recite it in a Fahrenheit 451 scenario. When I recorded it off PayTV at the age of 12, it earned the coveted SP speed and a Maxell tape. (Hey, big spender!) I’ve owned the film on every possible format, including a LaserDisc that fascinatingly transferred the entire negative area of the Super35 frame, something you’re not supposed to see. It remains a prized possession for that reason and because my dad surprised me with it when I came home to convalesce from a knee injury in university. It was a panacea, and he knew it. Still is, though I can be objective about it. I can be objective about anything I love except my cat, who is a perfect angel and don’t you forget it. What’s incredible is, I keep spotting new and intriguing grace notes in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While Rooney is puttering around outside Casa Bueller, for instance, he begins absentmindedly humming Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen”–which is, of course, the movie’s first unofficial theme song: Ferris sings it in the shower and later lip-synchs it in the Von Steuben Day Parade[x], just prior to blowing the doors off with a rousing air-band of The Beatles.

It got me thinking about how people like to say that Broderick is playing Ferris Bueller as a pathetic middle-aged horndog in Alexander Payne’s Election. Is this “Danke Schoen” earworm indicating that Rooney used to be a Ferris? Does Rooney regard Ferris as his Eve Harrington? It’s such a juicy idea I tried for a long time to make it work, but Rooney as written and portrayed simply has no residual rizz. Could he be a former Cameron seeking proxy revenge against a Bueller-esque presence in his past? More plausible–if I squint, I can see Cameron becoming a glorified narc for a living–but, ultimately, it’s an insult to Cameron to associate him with someone this utterly devoid of pathos. No, the “Danke Schoen” meme is more evidence of Ferris’s insidious influence. He is the apex of a hive mind.[xi] For the record, I’ve never bought into the Election theory, either. Imagine that guy at any point in his life leading downtown Chicago in a chorus of “Twist and Shout” from a parade float. It’s impossible. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good litmus test for disproving the Rooney-as-old-Ferris hypothesis, too.

***

You’re still here?

***

This raises an interesting question: Is there even such a thing as a grown-up Ferris Bueller? Hughes expressed interest in writing a sequel provided Broderick was on board, but Broderick’s participation was contingent on seeing a script; neither man could put aside his ego and take a leap of faith. That, in my opinion, was for the best. The longer I dwell on it, the more convinced I am the notion of a grown-up Ferris Bueller is patently absurd. It’s never been quite so relevant to the conversation that, before becoming a filmmaker, Hughes worked at the Leo Burnett ad agency, one of the models for Sterling Cooper on “Mad Men”. There, he cooked up the cowboy mascot for Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops, Big Yella, a cowboy who bartered his yellow possessions for bowls of his favourite yellow cereal. As career achievements go, that probably doesn’t seem terribly impressive, but consider that although Big Yella retired three short years into the job, he was immortalized in a Funko Pop while his replacement, Poppy Porcupine, was not. Hughes had a peculiar genius for creating icons[xii]–he may, in fact, have had a genius for propaganda, explaining how he incepted the culture with Ferris Bueller while a string of Morgan Stewarts and Jake Speeds died on arrival. Newspaper ads for the film featured Broderick posed in the catapult, either full-body or up close, accompanied by the somewhat cryptic tagline “Leisure rules.” I recall the totemic impact these had on me at 11 years old; I was on board immediately. I doodled him (Ferris, not Broderick) in my sketchbook–next to Rambo and Indiana Jones, no doubt. Ferris Bueller, with his geometric attire (available as a licensed Halloween costume at a Party City near you) and penchant for poster proverbs that make him sound suspiciously like a TV pitchman[xiii], is the ultimate cartoon cereal mascot. And asking him to evolve is as ludicrous as expecting Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch to have a naval record.

The sugary muesli that is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t all empty calories, though. It was made by the same propagandist, after all. Hughes’s arsenal grew exponentially with each film, and he’s using every weapon in it this time around. In a sense, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is his North by Northwest: a regroup, a flex, and a terminus; no more teen movies with Hughes at the helm–this is it. (Hughes grew up admiring artists who went through definitive phases, from Picasso to Dylan.) But it doesn’t feel premature, only four movies into his directing career, since it’s five different movies in and of itself. If this isn’t discombobulating, that’s because Ferris Bueller’s Day Off captures something of the teenager’s shifting priorities and emotional mercuriality, and because Hughes is exuding the kind of swagger that begets magnum opuses.[xiv] This confidence leads to a formal daring that was a breath of fresh air 38 years ago–especially for a demographic accustomed to the absence of an authorial voice, like sandwiches with the crusts cut off–and frankly still is. I’m in awe of the sarcastic Greek chorus that chimes in on the soundtrack with custom lyrics for “Go Down Moses” (“When Cameron was in Egypt’s land/Let my Cameron gooooo”), and the snatch of doo-wop (“Oh, Shauna/Oh, Shauna/Oh, Shauna, Jeeeaaannn”) that springs up when Jeanie tells Charlie Sheen her name is Jean, “But a lot of guys call me Shauna”–itself a line that has mystified me for decades, yet I laugh every time because of that cue. (Hughes calls the song “a nice little thing” in his commentary!) Hughes is a unicorn: a Republican with a developed sense of humour, an ear for music, and aesthetic flair.

Aye, there’s the rub. Hughes was deservedly lionized for his Gen-X sensitivities and proclivities, manifesting as they do in complex teen characters and a commiserative contempt for authority figures. His generation fares poorly by comparison. Take the dads in Weird Science: sour, frosty, incapable of love; I keep coming back to that disturbing moment where Wyatt’s parents return from wherever it is they went and Wyatt’s father rejects a hug from his son–a striking intrusion of reality that justifies the escapist function of Weird Science for the children of assholes. Even the demonstrative Mr. and Mrs. Bueller are pretty terrible: they love Ferris because they don’t listen to their kids, and they hate Jeanie for the same reason. Alas, Hughes’s generational biases, contained but irrepressible, have a tendency to spill out into the text in unpredictable ways, and one of the reasons the younger generations can’t fuck with Ferris is that his voice finally suffers from Boomer-itis: he’s a sanctimonious ideologue given to ’60s references (“Danke Schoen,” “I Am the Walrus”) and a narrowly bourgeois vision of Chicago (the financial district, fine dining, an art gallery).

This review isn’t quite the apologia I set out to write, mainly because Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a film of discrete pleasures, and at a certain point I worry I’m Cameron, fixating on the brushstrokes. The Nouvelle Vague tang of Tak Fujimoto’s widescreen cinematography, for example, a ’60s reference that’s actually resonant in drawing a line of tradition from insouciant Ferris and chic Sloane back to the bandit couples of Godard’s sexy early crime pastiches. The uncanny metronome of Hirsch’s editing, which locates the drumbeat in everything from Cameron making the sound of a dripping faucet to a little old lady fishtailing in the middle of a car chase. Ferris playfully pretending to chomp his dad’s finger when he’s tucked in at movie’s end. (My mother always cracks up there, remembering the put-on sweetness of her sons.) Like the Seurat, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a deceptively simple mosaic that rewards granular study. It’s a big canvas–if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Paramount has reissued Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over and over again on a panoply of video formats. Hughes’s feature-length commentary made the 1999 DVD highly collectible because it was dropped from subsequent DVD and Blu-ray editions after that disc went out of print; fortunately, the studio saw fit to restore it for the film’s 4K debut last August. It’s precious because nothing else like it exists: Hughes had retreated from the movie business by then, and in the ensuing years, he eschewed publicity altogether. By the time I appeared in Matt Sadowski’s documentary Don’t You Forget About Me (better than Andrew McCarthy’s Brats, if I do say so myself), in 2006, Hughes had acquired the reputation of a recluse à la J.D. Salinger. I don’t know if we can infer anything from this being Hughes’s first and only commentary track–but it seems significant. Whatever the case, he’d evidently warmed to the picture in the 13 years since souring on it in post and begging Hirsch to burn the negative.

Hughes’s yakker hits the ground running. We learn that he scheduled the prologue and epilogue for the end of production to ensure his leading man was “very, very practised” at talking to the audience. He later notes Broderick’s discomfort when they did the gag outdoors, owing to the actor seeing his reflection in the camera lens. Inevitably, the subject of Matthew Broderick exerts a gravitational pull on this monologue: Hughes praises the theatricality of his performance as something he sought out in casting a stage veteran–“He’s playing an ideal“–and observes that Broderick’s first scene with Ruck echoes the synchronicity they developed as Broadway co-stars. He highlights his Hitchcock cameo (that’s Hughes’s hand “dramatically” pressing the button on Cameron’s answering machine) and various ad-libs, revealing that Ferris’s clarinet recital and Del Close’s lecture on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” were improvised on the spot. His memories of the “Twist and Shout” sequence, a combination of guerrilla filmmaking and old-fashioned montage, are misty-eyed and watercoloured; Chicago clearly had his back that “wonderful” day. For what it’s worth, dead air is not uncommon, nor are gratuitous but flowery insights into character motivation that betray the frustrated novelist lurking within Hughes. (In a foreword to ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY’s 2008 reprint of “Vacation ’58,” the short story that begat National Lampoon’s Vacation, Hughes wrote that he once envisioned himself as “Chicago’s Booth Tarkington Jr.”) Still, what a privilege to watch the movie in the company of the maestro, who is in generally fine form.

A clatch of standard-def extras recycled from the 2005 DVD graces the 4K platter. Disappointingly, there are no fresh bonus features (Hirsch would be up for one of Paramount’s “Filmmaker Focus” segments, I’m sure), nor is there a section of deleted scenes even though discarded footage was resurrected for the most recent physical releases of Planes, Trains & Automobiles and The Breakfast Club. In “Getting the Class Together – The Cast of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (28 mins.), casting directors Jane Jenkins and Janet Hirshenson tell us the one other person in contention for Ferris was John Cusack. There was no shortage of talent in those days, Hirshenson clarifies–it was a matter of who could do it without turning Ferris into a “real obnoxious brat.” Hughes, appearing in archival footage, in shades, from 1986, avers that he grew to appreciate how Broderick would “throttle some of my tendencies, push me a little further in certain areas.” Ruck, it turns out, had a dual casting advantage: not only did his chemistry with Broderick come pre-established, but he was in contention for an earlier incarnation of The Breakfast Club when Hughes was going to do it as an independent film. Ruck repeats the rumour he was a distant third choice after Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall (?) turned it down. (He claims he has thanked Estevez personally.) Unsurprisingly, Mia Sara–who has a complicated relationship with the film, isolated as she was by her age (18) and the boy’s-club atmosphere on set[xv]–did not submit to a new interview, but her teenage self is poised in a talking head from 1986 where she refers to Sloane as “Ferris’s foundation.” Whether it’s the bubble of youth or beauty that leads her to express disbelief that guys like Cameron exist in real life, it’s impossible to say. Virtually everybody else is present and accounted for, from Kristy Swanson (!) to Jonathan Schmock (the snooty maître’ d), with Grey acting as though she played Hedda Gabler. (It’s endearing.)

Hughes was alive at the time these featurettes were produced, but you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise by the funereal tenor of the reminiscing. “The Making of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (15 mins.) begins with Ben Stein calling Hughes a genius and Hughes’s former producer Tom Jacobson credibly repeating the legend that the script for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was hatched in seven days under pressure from studio head Ned Tanen to have something ready to greenlight ahead of an impending writer’s strike. The disgraced Jeffrey Jones nevertheless shames my verbosity with this pithy summary of Hughes: “He had a very rounded view of how character, story, and photography all work together.” It’s the “photography” that people overlook, you know? The great Edie McClurg delivers a fantastic anecdote about Hughes asking her and Jones for some “frantic action” not indicated on the page. McClurg more or less talked Jones down from a panic attack–improv wasn’t his forte–by turning it into a game for him, and Hughes got the whole thing in one take. Broderick singles out Hirsch’s editing for hosannas, and Jacobson sheds light on Hughes’s secret sauce: coverage, coverage, coverage. The Ferrari, by the way, is three Mustangs with fibreglass sculpts over their chassis; the insurance for the real deal was prohibitively expensive. One of the more convincing body doubles in movie history, if you ask me.

“Who Is Ferris Bueller?” (9 mins.) asks an existential question that cast and crew attempt to answer as best they can. Hughes, from a 1987 vantage, says he wanted to write something that “showed the positive values of not taking yourself quite so seriously.” (Those who bore the brunt of Hughes’s grudges and paranoia over the years would be forgiven for thinking, “Physician, heal thyself.”) Broderick, in a contemporary interview, describes Bueller as “an attitude and a way of life,” while Grey, in 2005, speaks fondly of ex-boyfriend Broderick and insists that he is inextricable from Bueller–something Hughes and Jones seem to concur with as the piece segues into a discussion of Broderick’s theatre training. I believe we get a fleeting glimpse of Hughes’s spiteful side when Broderick quotes Hughes as having said to him, “You work best when you’re alone.” It sounds complimentary, but Broderick’s rueful chuckle and headshake suggest otherwise. Next, “The World According to Ben Stein” (11 mins.) alternates a spry 1986 Stein with the canned version he’d become by 2005. Both Steins cop to a lust for fame that would be unseemly coming from anyone who’s not a cute girl on Instagram, let alone a former Nixon speechwriter and current Trump supporter. Lastly, “Vintage Ferris Bueller: The Lost Tapes” (10 mins.) is a strange artifact from 1986 featuring the actors conducting an impromptu junket in pairs–Broderick with Ruck, Ruck with Sara, and Broderick with Jones–on the “Chez Qui” set. The questions are pro forma (“How do you like working with Mia Sara?”), sometimes asked with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but the answers don’t always follow suit. Broderick and Ruck make for the most dynamic duo, and I loved a digression in which they try to sort the central trio into id, ego, and superego. Transitional B-roll and behind-the-scenes footage of the Abe Froman scene contains dialogue unheard in the finished film.

Owing to its bright photography and the sharpness of the Super35 lensing, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has always exported well to home video, but the 2.39:1, 2160p transfer on Paramount’s UHD disc is a revelation. Any fears that this will be another noise-reduced atrocity like the studio’s 4K “upgrade” of Planes, Trains & Automobiles are immediately laid to rest by the supple, unobtrusive film grain percolating over a piercingly clear image. (Optical dirt has been scrubbed without compromising fine detail.) The wider colour gamut brings untold allure to the candy-apple red Ferrari, restores vigour to the cornflower blue skies, and infuses A Sunday on La Grande Jatte with a lushness printed reproductions only hint at. It’s the Dolby Vision/HDR10 enhancement, though, that bumps up this presentation from handsome to miraculous, breathing light and, therefore, life into a film commonly dismissed as flat and televisual.

I’m struck by how the newfound luminance subtly alters Grace’s vestibule when Jeanie visits at 46:02, the broader dynamic range creating a barrel effect that expressionistically evokes Jeanie’s Kafka-esque predicament. As Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron dropped the Ferrari off at the parking garage, I was stunned to notice that the wisp of blush on Sloane’s face is refracted red from the hood of the car. The interplay of light on their faces in these shots is breathtaking besides, capturing that specific flavour of afternoon sun beckoning beyond the shadowy interior. While the 2009 Blu-ray was perfectly adequate, I feel comfortable slingshotting it into the moon now. At least in its 7.1 Dolby TrueHD mixdown sans height channels, the attendant Dolby Atmos track is relatively underwhelming: To my failing ears, it isn’t substantially different from or superior to the front-forward 5.1 remix of the DVD and Blu-ray. (“Oh Yeah” does sound fuller and deeper than ever, I guess.) On the one hand, I’m grateful for the lack of revisionism; on the other, if you’re going to go the Atmos route, why be timid about it? I wish the original four-channel Dolby mix were on board as well, but forget it, Jake, it’s Paramount. U.S. copies are bundled with a digital code.

103 minutes; PG-13; 2.39:1 (2160p/MPEG-H), Dolby Vision|HDR10; English Dolby Atmos (7.1 Dolby TrueHD core), English DVS 2.0, German DD 2.0, Castilian Spanish DD 2.0, French DD 2.0; English, English SDH, German, Castilian Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese subtitles; BD-66; Region-free; Paramount

[i] The (dreary) 2004 Charles Shyer remake with Jude Law goes so far as to return the favour by paying homage to Ferris thrusting his palm out to stop us from casting a downward glance in a moment where Alfie shoos us out of his bathroom.

[ii] The water tower was located in Hughes’s hometown of Northbrook, IL, where there is talk of repainting “Save Ferris” every few years to attract tourists and honour the film’s compounding anniversaries. In the meantime, visitors can sit on the John Hughes commemorative bench and enjoy an unimpeded view of the tower.

[iii] Now the Willis Tower. For a full inventory and virtual tour of the filming locations, visit CURBED CHICAGO.

[iv] Note that the background extras are standing similarly but incidentally–a bit of art criticism on Hughes’s part that implies what Rodin was trying to depict in Balzac was the face of judgment. The sculpture is reflecting, nay, lampooning us.

[v] The Smiths‘ original was heard earlier that year in Pretty in Pink.

[vi] This could be why I have a high tolerance for Ferris Bueller.

[vii] Overwriting and over-shooting, then chiselling away at the excess in post, was Hughes’s George Stevens-like M.O.

[viii] In his audio commentary, Hughes brings up the vestigial subtext of Grey’s performance: Jeanie was initially the disgruntled middle child of the Bueller clan.

[ix] 1963’s Hair-Breadth Hurry, directed by Chuck Jones.

[x] A September event (hence the background marquee for Teen Wolf, a late-August 1985 release), contradicting the impression that the school year is winding down in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Fortunately, there was no Google in those days.

[xi] “Danke Schoen” shows up as a motif partly for autobiographical reasons: Because of the large German population in Chicago, the song was inescapable for Hughes as a teen. “Every time it came on,” he laments here, “I wanted to claw my face.”

[xii] “John Hughes is like Frankenstein and Ferris Bueller was the monster,” Broderick recently quipped to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. Maybe Weird Science isn’t as impersonal as all that.

[xiii] The proof is in the pudding: Bueller and his catchphrases were spoofed in a 2012 Superbowl spot for the Honda CR-V starring Broderick and directed by Todd Phillips.

[xiv] Technically, the plural of “opus” is opera.

[xv] Something a more modern featurette would have an obligation to acknowledge.