Home Alone (John Hughes Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on Christmas evening Charles and I watched the 1990 (that’s the date on indb.com, though I remembered the film coming out in 1991 and my joking about the name of its director, Chris Columbis, “Ah! HIs first hit in 499 years!”) original Home Alone. I hadn’t seen it in years – not since it first came out on VHS tape in the early 1990’s – but when Charles’s mother Edi was giving away her DVD’;s because she’s gone over to the dark side of “streaming” (as far as I’m concerned, “streaming” is what I do when i pee), I grabbed her boxed set of all four Home Alone movies (did you realize there were that many of them? I sure didn’t!). I screened the first Home Alone last night, not only because it was a Christmas-tthemed movie but because I’d had fond memories of it and had found it an utter delight. I still do; it’s by no means a great movie, but it’s a thoroughly entertaining one and, as Charles said after we watched it, it didn’t aim high but definitely hit the target its makers (notably John Hughes, who produced the film and wrote its script even though he didn’t direct it) intended.

By now just about everybody in the civilized world knows the basic plot of this story, but just in case, here goes: Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is the youngest of seven children, and his parents Peter (John Heard) and Kate (Catherine O’Hara) are planning to take the entire family to Paris to spend the holidays with Peter’s brother Frank (Gerry Bamman), who lives there. Only the night before they’re supposed to leave they lock Kevin in the attic, and when they have to depart in a hurry they simply forget about him. Their family passes the head cound due to a neighbor kid who sneaks in to their line and essentially takes Kevin’s place, and in one of the great comic-shock scenes of all time the McCallisters are on the airliner to Paris when Kate suddenly realizes she forgot something. She and Peter sort out the obvious things, from their passports to their toothbrushes, and all those things they have on them. Then, with a jolt, she sits bolt-upright in her airplane seat and exclaims, “KEVIN!”

The film is at once a coming-of-age tale for the eight-year-old Kevin (though Culkin was 10 when he made it), whose six onder siblings have made fun of him for being so lame and incompetent but who develops amazing powers of resourcefulness, and a tale of how his parents frantically search for a way to get home in a hurry and find out that every plane is booked solid for the holidays. Kevin manages to shop for himself (courtesy of a stash of money he’s found in his oldest brother’s bedroom) and vanquish a pair of comically inept burglars, Harry Lynne (Joe Pesci, who proves just as adept ini comic villainy as he was in real villainy in films like his immediately previous one, Martin Scorsese’s gangster drama GoodFellas) and Marv Munchins (Daniel Stern). The two have concocted an elaborate scheme for hitting as many of the houses in this affluent Chicago-suburb neighborhood as possible: Harry poses as a police officer and knocks on the doors of various residents to inquire about their travel plans for the holidays and the security arrangements they’ve made. Then he and Marv will use this information to burglarize them.

Only they run afoul of Kevin, who rigs up an elaborate set of traps not only to protect the house from the wanna-be burglars but to make them hurt so much they’ll either give up or be sitting ducks for arrest by the real police. Kevin recognizes Harry as the “cop” who visited them before they were supposed to leave because of an ill-fitting gold tooth filling on his lower jaw, which comes off during one of the Three Stooges-like slapstick scenes. Kevin also has his comeuppance when he realizes that, as hard as he wished his whole family would disappear, the reality of having them all gone is more than he can bear and he welcomes them back when they finally return. There’s also a subplot about a scary-looking old man, Marley (Roberts Blossom), who at first seems so hostile and forbidding the McCallister kids make up stories about him being a never-caught serial killer – when he first appeared I referenced Meet Me in St. Louis and joked, “I hate you, Mr. Brouckoff!” – who turns out to be just a lonely old man because he’s become estranged from his son and therefore has to sneak into church to hear his granddaughter sing in the choir. Of course Kevin runs into him at a late-night Christmas Eve service and worms the story out of him, eventually encouraging him to contact his son and reconcile. There's also a great cameo by the late John Candy as Gus Polinski, leader of a polka band who are driving from New York to Milwaukee and offer Kate McCallister a ride to Chicago because it’s on their way.

When I watched Macaulay Culkin in his first major adult role in the 2003 film Party Monster, a marvelous and woefully underrated film in which Culkin played real-life killer Michael Alig, leader of a “club kid” subculture he helped create, I commented that in Home Alone Culkin played a child with the resourcefulness of an adult, while in Party Monster he played an adult with the emotional immaturity of a child. This time around, while watching Home Alone, it occurred to he that this is the sort of film Buster Keaton would have made if he’d entered movies as a child. Remember that Keaton was already a professional performer since age three – though he wouldn’t discover filmmaking until 1917, when he heard Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was shooting a movie in New York, showed up on the set to see what this filmmaking business was about and ended up playing a part in the film. Keaton was essentially a stooge for his parents in their vaudeville act, billed as “The Three Keatons, Featuring Buster the Human Mop” – and at one point the Gerry Society, a do-gooder group in New York, reported the Keatons to child protective authorities. Buster Keaton recalled having to perform his act in a courtroom before a judge to prove that, as dangerous as it looked on stage, he was a fully trained acrobat and wasn’t in any real harm’s way.

One thing Charles and I both liked about Home Alone is that John Hughes and Chris Columbus were able to create gags that built on each other in an ever-increasing cascade of laughter – a largely lost art that was second nature to Chaplin, Keaton and the other great silent comedians – and I was impressed with the slapstick in Home Alone even though I was also made a bit uncomfortable with the amount of sheer pain inflicted on Harry and Marv. Granted, they’re burglars and therefore we’re supposed not to feel too sorry for them, but still I had some of the same level of unease I get when watching the Three Stooges and realizing how much their gags must literally have hurt them.