The cinetrix has been blindsided. You see, on March 24, 1984, five students served Saturday detention at Shermer High School. Which means that The Breakfast Club is now TWENTY YEARS OLD.
To observe this milestone, the Independent reconsiders the oeuvre of the auteur of adolescence, John Hughes. [via GreenCine]
To borrow Tom Wolfe's description of Phil Spector, John Hughes was the "tycoon of teen". Throughout the Eighties, Hughes directed a clutch of films that both defined and celebrated what it meant to be young in that decade. Like Spector, he operated in a genre that was generally considered superficial and banal, and, like Spector, he transcended the genre to create a body of work that was exuberant, exhilarating and revealing. With films such as Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, John Hughes made stars of what came to be known as the "Brat Pack" - Matthew Broderick, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez and the flame-haired teen temptress Molly Ringwald.Hughes's films often featured these same actors, and all were set in the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois. Where Thomas Hardy had Wessex, Hughes had Shermer, and the town's geography connects all of his work: Del Griffin from Planes, Trains and Automobiles lives two doors from Samantha Baker (of Sixteen Candles fame), who knows Ferris Bueller, who went to Shermer High School - as do the characters in The Breakfast Club. The word "auteur" may usually be reserved for film-makers such as Bergman and Godard, but John Hughes was the auteur of adolescence, and The Breakfast Club was his finest moment.
One of the great injustices of the cinetrix's teen years was not being allowed to see The Breakfast Club in the theatre [it was playing at the Queen Anne, so I had to drive past it every day on the way to and from school] because it was rated R. Mom*, I might have been an investment broker by now, if only you had let me get this whole movie phase out of my system.
*In fairness, my mom and I watched flicks together--like Sid & Nancy and My Beautiful Laundrette [a doomed British romances double feature!]--all the time when I was young, and she still sees more movies than I do now by exploiting her local interlibrary loan system.
