The scene John Candy couldn’t shoot without cracking up: “Everybody lost it”
Despite being just 43 when he passed, John Candy left a monumental impact on pop culture, either as a leading man or a supporting player in some of the funniest films ever made.
Everyone has their favourite Candy appearance (you can’t beat The Blues Brothers in my opinion), but one that has found its way into millions of people’s yearly routines is the John Hughes-directed road movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which sees him star as Del Griffith, a well-meaning yet deeply irritating salesman.
Del runs into Neal Page, a pernickety ad-man played by Steve Martin, who is desperately trying to make it home for the holidays, and over the course of three days, this pair of unlikely partners encounter all sorts of wacky problems and discover that they’re more alike than they seem.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes features the two lead characters sharing a hotel bed, where as the camera pans to the left, we see that Del is spooning Neal, who doesn’t seem to mind one bit. After some light ear-kissing and the realisation that Del’s hand isn’t between “two pillows”, the pair leap up and recoil in horror; it’s not exactly high art, but a funny scene nonetheless, about which Candy has spoken with great fondness on multiple occasions.
In their ‘Oral History’ of the movie, Vanity Fair quoted the star talking about it at a press conference in 1987, where he recalled, “That was one of the hardest parts. You’d see the cameras start, you know, they’d look at us, and we’d see that, we’d start laughing, and then everybody started.”
In an interview with Bob Costas two years later, he relayed that, “Every time we got in that position, we’d start laughing, and we’d hear the music, and we’d start laughing. Then we’d settle down, and we’d see the cameras start shaking, everybody lost it.”
Candy revealed that he was getting serious direction from Hughes while the scene was playing out, which made it even harder not to break, to the point where the music that accompanies the scene, Emmylou Harris’ cover of ‘Back in My Baby’s Arms’, was actually played on set. This made the scene of a grey-haired Martin being held so tenderly by Candy’s hulking frame even funnier for all involved and no doubt contributed to much of the laughter.
This is just one of the many laugh-out-loud moments littering the film, but what makes Planes, Trains and Automobiles so special is that it isn’t afraid to get deep. In fact, during the scene in which Del makes a confession about his personal life to Neal, Candy improvised a line so devastating that Martin still can’t rewatch it without crying.
The journey that the two men go on mirrors the way audiences feel about how the narrative unfolds, all of which builds towards the movie’s emotional climax, whereas moments like the bed scene are a good reminder of why Candy’s legacy is still going strong. His contributions to comedy were so important, they made him laugh even while he was performing them, and it doesn’t get much better than that.
