National Lampoon’s Vacation **** (1983, Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Anthony Michael Hall, Dana Barron, Imogene Coca, Eddie Bracken) – Classic Movie Review 2763

Director Harold Ramis’s 1983 comedy stars Chevy Chase as inventor Clark Griswold, who takes a vacation across America from the family home in Chicago to California’s famous ‘Walley World’ theme park, named after Eddie Bracken’s thin m0ustached character Roy Walley in a parody of Disneyland (with Roy Walley a combination of brothers Roy and Walt Disney).

He takes along with him his wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) and children Rusty and Audrey (Anthony Michael Hall and Dana Barron). Clark falls asleep at the wheel and the car goes hilariously out of control. And then the journey becomes just one catastrophe after another.

The movie, however, is a surprisingly successful black farce, with plenty of big laughs, in the screenplay by John Hughes (based on his short story), some of them quite cruel. Also in the cast are Imogene Coca as mean old Aunt Edna, Randy Quaid, John Candy, Christie Brinkley, Eugene Levy, James Keach, Jane Krakowski, Frank McRae, Miriam Flynn and Brian Doyle-Murray.

John Candy was paid $1 million for his brief appearance at the end of the movie. The screenplay is based on Hughes’s short story Vacation 58, which appeared in the September 1979 issue of National Lampoon. It was originally conceived as a raunchier R-rated comedy targeting young adults. But Ramis and Chase rewrote Hughes’s screenplay to shift the focus from the teenagers to the parents. The ending was rewritten and reshot with a very much taller Anthony Michael Hall after being what Hughes described as ‘thoroughly despised by preview audiences’.

Ramis cast Candy as Laskey the Guard after working with him on SCTV, Canada’s version of Saturday Night Live and had him play the character as a relative of his Paul Fistinyourface from the show. Eugene Levy (the car salesman) also worked with Candy and Ramis on SCTV.

It follows the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978. After the huge success of Vacation, the sequels were toned down and made more family friendly. In each of the main films of the series, the Griswold children are portrayed by different actors since, after Anthony Michael Hall declined to reprise his role in European Vacation to star in Weird Science, it was decided to recast both children.

It was followed by National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989),Vegas Vacation (1997) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2 (2003), and rebooted in 2015 with Ed Helms as a grown-up Rusty Griswold and Christina Applegate as his wife Debbie.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2763

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