The Sleeper John Hughes Mini-Classic

Hughes had had bigger hits and more important films before Uncle Buck -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, Planes Trains and Automobiles -- and (as a writer only) he'd have one humungous blockbuster after it(Home Alone) but...Uncle Buck sort of squeezed in there as its own very unique comedy classic.

Oh, not that unique, maybe. Its still set in the affluent suburbs of Chicago, and a high school figures prominently , as does an officious school official...

....and it PREPARES us for a film to come very soon: Home Alone, what with MacCauley Culkin making a sweet yet wry debut(for Hughes at least) in a characterization that won't change much for the big blockbuster ahead(in roughly the same affluent Chicago suburbs.) With Home Alone (and its first sequel) now firmly in our memories, Uncle Buck is almost a prequel.

But a prequel with its own charms, principally John Candy allowed to "center" a movie after a few years in the second lead in good movies(Splash) and/ or as the lead in bad movies.

I like how Buck..no matter how huge Candy was at the time -- believably fields a fiancée who adores him(through her frustration and rage) and just as believably finds himself stalked by an insane nympho type(Laurie Metcalf -- how did she bug out those eyes so permanently?) Moreover, with his size and manner, Candy believeably vanquishes a drunken party clown and physically threatens a tough guy or a younger thinner guy, with his size. He's kinda macho.

But also very funny, very charming in his own way...we're on his side, all the way.

EXCEPT in how hard he comes down on the quite beyotchy teenager Tia. The film cuts a rather adult ambiguity in making HER look awful from the get-go(the actress is directed to almost constantly shift her eyes left or right in varying degrees of simmering rage, disgust, or superiorty -- you HATE her), but making Uncle Buck's hard-ass punishments and humiliations of her a bit too...unfair?(Or something.) While Buck and Tia engage in a mutual hatred society(heading for a happy ending of course), lil' McCauley gets to pair up with a sweet faced little girl as his sister and...Buck wins their hearts from the beginning(the girl's demand to sleep in the same bed with Buck can be taken as innocently today as it was intended then.)

Its Candy's show...switching from comical to tough to kinda sad(he's the unmarried, childless n'er do well brother to a very well off other brother -- and he's been REMOVED from group wedding photos). He gets a fun "Dragnet" Q and A from Culkin(who's first slide and freeze into kitchen and discovery of Uncle Buck there is cartoon-funny); he gets to take down the clown (but not before some initial friendly-guy Candyisms "You've uh, you've had a coupla drinks, haven't ya?") he smokes a tiny cigar with smile and wears a big coat/scarf/hat outfit with a big man's grace...and of course he drives a smoke-spewing exploding tailpipe car. Also nifty is his one-sided failed telephone argument with his unseen fiancé: "But -- I -- wait -- you -- uh -- but -- I -- hold on -- what? -- I..."

Candy didn't live that much longer after Uncle Buck; it rather ended up his signature role(oh, I suppose Planes and Trains was a bigger hit but THIS one is his, and he's rather cool and heroic.)

The film fits nicely into John Hughes special world, in which realistic people do realistic things alongside cartoonish people who do cartoonish things(Baking a giant pancake; bouncing backwards up and down from a punch) ..and sometimes the realistic people and the cartoon people are the same people(i.e. Uncle Buck.)

And in another "Home Alone" lead in, Young MacCauley washes some dishes to some old-time syncopated jazz type singing (that will be the hepcat "White Christmas" the next year.)

It boils down, perhaps, to the overdone poster for "Uncle Buck." That's what its all about.

Possibly the greatest starring role for John Candy, ever.