My Favourite Movies: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

I have been a huge John Hughes fan since my 20’s and love pretty much everything he has produced. But one of my particular favourites has to be Ferris Bueller. Made 26 years ago it still manages to make me laugh out loud after more than 20 viewings. I just watched it again this afternoon and probably enjoyed it almost as much as the first time I saw it. Starring the very talented Matthew Broderick as the eponymous Bueller and the beautiful Mia Sara as his girlfriend this is the story of Ferris taking a day off High School (‘sagging’ or ‘bunking’ as we called it) to spend it with his friends in Chicago. What little tension there is in this movie – after all it is a teen comedy – comes from the attempts of the school Principal to catch him in the act and his sister, played by Jennifer Grey (one year away from Dirty Dancing), who wants to get revenge on her brother who seems to get away with everything.

Of course the fun part of the film revolves around the friend’s adventures in the big city, where the ‘borrowed’ Ferrari is taken for a ride by the parking attendants, where Ferris bluffs his way into a posh restaurant, and takes over a float (pictured above) in the German American parade through the city. It’s often very silly (with the occasional lapse into being outrageous) but is generally good clean innocent fun. Broderick makes it his film – as you would expect – and carries it really well. Everyone else is basically there as a prop for him and, for someone so young, he does a very good job of making the audience believe that he lives a charmed life. Mia Sara is somewhat underutilised as his eye-candy girlfriend but does manage to round out her character with some good one-liners. His best friend Cameron, played by Alan Ruck, is understated but funny, learning at last to stand up to his domineering father, just before ‘killing’ his favourite car. In some ways that was the whole point of the day - to teach Cameron to stand on his own feet. In many ways this is a typically formulaic Hughes film. But Hughes produced some of the best teen movies in the 80’s and even the worst of his films have flashes of brilliance. This, being far from his worst, has something to recommend almost every scene. A great film for a lazy wet afternoon. If you haven’t experience the Hughes effect then this is an excellent place to start.