National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (Hughes Entertainment, National Lampoon, Paramount, 1989)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, December 4 my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched the 1989 movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which was written by and co-produced by John Hughes and directed by someone named Jeremiah Chechik. I’d avoided the National Lampoon movies because I’d assumed they were stupid sex comedies, but despite a few of those elements most of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was actually quite funny. It’s obvious Hughes had been studying the great silent and early-sound comedians from the 1910’s, 1920’s and early 1930’s – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy in particular. The plot deals with Clark Griswold (former Saturday Night Live star Chevy Chase), his wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) and their kids Rusty (Johnny Galeki) and Audrey (Juliette Lewis) inviting their extended families for Christmas as their house guests, and the mayhem that predictably ensues. It was a joy to see veteran actor E. G. Marshall as D’Angelo’s dad, and Randy Quaid and Miriam Flynn as a nomad couple who show up in an R.V. in which they live. (I’ve mentioned before that in addition to all his other innovations, Buster Keaton essentially invented the R.V.; he converted a bus into a living space he called his “land yacht,” and when he was under contract to MGM and drinking a lot he parked it on the studio grounds when he was working so he wouldn’t have to deal with a drunken commute home.) The film began with a great sequence in which the Griswolds have to deal with two drunken rednecks in an old van who are trying to run them off the road, and they end up literally trapped under a truck. I admire the film’s stunt drivers who were able to handle literally driving under a truck and make it convincing. I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised at how good this movie was – though now that decades later I’ve finally started catching up with John Hughes’s oeuvre I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how good a lot of it was, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation also featured a neighbor couple, Todd and Margo Chester (Nicholas Guest and the young Julia-Louis Dreyfus), whom I didn’t realize until Charles pointed it out were actually parodies of yuppies, and a great performance by former Betty Boop voice actor Mae Quetzal as Aunt Bethany, an Alzheimer’s patient who gets things so mixed up that when Clark Griswold asks her to say grace before the Christmas meal, she leads the table in the Pledge of Allegiance instead.