what the film does
clark griswold wants to spend more time with his family. the plan is a cross-country road trip from chicago to walley world, “america’s favorite family fun park,” in a car the dealer talked him into: a metallic pea-green wagon queen family truckster that looks like a station wagon designed by committee. his wife ellen wanted to fly. his kids rust and audrey are already rolling their eyes.
the trip is a cascade of disasters. in st. louis, clark takes a wrong turn and gets the car tagged by vandals. in dodge city, he antagonizes a bartender. across the plains, a beautiful woman in a red ferrari keeps pulling up alongside, and clark keeps noticing. at cousin eddie’s farm in kansas, the family inherits aunt edna, cranky, ancient, and traveling with a mean little dog named dinky. clark ties dinky to the bumper at a campground and drives off without untying him. the dog does not survive. aunt edna does not forgive him.
the car breaks down in the desert. the mechanic, who is also the sheriff, takes clark’s remaining cash and leaves the truckster barely running. at the grand canyon, clark’s credit cards are frozen, so he raids the cash register behind the hotel clerk’s back. somewhere in arizona, aunt edna dies in her sleep. they wrap her in a tarp, tie her to the roof, and leave her on her son’s back porch with a note.
by the time they reach california, clark is the only one who still wants to go to walley world. he has a brief, embarrassing swim with the ferrari blonde in a motel pool while his family watches. ellen forgives him. they all jump in.
the park is closed. two weeks for repairs. clark, by now fully unmoored, buys a realistic-looking bb gun, marches into the park, and forces the security guard to take them on every ride. an lapd swat team surrounds them. the park owner, roy walley, shows up and, moved by clark’s devotion to the family vacation, decides not to press charges. the griswalds and the swat team ride the coasters together. the credits roll over snapshots of the trip, ending with the family flying home.
where it sits in the canon
the canon has an uneven relationship with broad studio comedies, but vacation earns its slot because it is the template. every family road-trip movie made since 1983 is either copying it, avoiding it, or pretending it does not exist. john hughes wrote it as a short story for national lampoon in 1979, harold ramis and chevy chase rewrote the screenplay from the father’s point of view, and the result is a comedy that understands the gap between what clark griswold imagines a family vacation should be and what the actual family is experiencing. the walley world matte painting, a gorgeous enormous skyline that looms over the parking lot, is one of the great visual punchlines of the decade.
the canon already holds planes trains and automobiles (john hughes’s other road movie) and the great outdoors (john hughes writing for john candy). vacation is the origin point, the one where hughes was still working from his own national lampoon material and before the formula calcified into christmas vacation sentiment. it is meaner, dirtier, and funnier than its sequels, and the truckster alone is worth the entry.
image: letterboxd still, baked 0.45, output 34.0