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About This Film
Two days before Thanksgiving, advertising executive Neal Page only wants to get home to Chicago. Every available system—taxi, airplane, train, bus, rental car, highway—seems determined to prevent it. John Hughes builds the film as a travel nightmare, but the machinery is secondary to the collision between Steve Martin’s tightly controlled Neal and John Candy’s expansive shower-curtain-ring salesman Del Griffith. Del is irritating because he fills every silence Neal wants to preserve, yet the movie gradually reveals how much loneliness sits underneath that sociability. Thanksgiving gives the journey its emotional deadline: home is not simply a destination but a promise of warmth, family, and belonging. By delaying Neal’s arrival, the film strips away his sense of entitlement and makes him see the person traveling beside him. The famous final movement works because the comedy has quietly been reorganizing itself around hospitality—the holiday value Neal assumes he already understands.
Famous Quote
“Those aren't pillows!”— Neal Page (English)
Vibe
Thanksgiving —
Watch For
- Watch how each failed mode of transportation strips Neal of another layer of control, status, or privacy.
- Notice John Candy’s shifts between comic excess and private stillness; Del often tells the truth emotionally before Neal is ready to hear it.
- Track the film’s recurring images of luggage, money, tickets, and temporary shelter as measures of security.
- Pay attention to Neal’s homeward gaze throughout the film; Thanksgiving becomes more meaningful only after he recognizes that Del has no equivalent destination.
Production Notes
AFI records the film as John Hughes’s first adult comedy after his run of teen films and notes that Hughes drew on his own difficult travel experiences between Chicago and New York while working in advertising. Principal photography began in March 1987. A lack of Chicago snow forced part of the production to Buffalo, after which shooting continued in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. The weather problem became almost perfectly aligned with the finished movie’s identity: transportation disruption and winter inconvenience are not background texture but the physical form of Neal’s frustration. AFI also notes that the film opened November 25, 1987—the day before Thanksgiving—and that Hughes’s unusually concentrated burst of profanity at the rental-car counter was enough to preserve the film’s R rating despite Paramount’s appeal.
Trivia
- AFI lists Thanksgiving Day among the film’s subjects and places the story two days before the holiday.
- John Hughes wrote, directed, and produced the film; AFI describes it as his first adult comedy after his teen-film breakthrough.
- Hughes drew on his own experiences with disrupted business travel between Chicago and New York.
- Because Chicago lacked the needed snow, production moved to Buffalo before continuing in other cities.
- The film opened on November 25, 1987, the day before Thanksgiving, reinforcing its immediate association with holiday travel.
Legacy
The film has become one of the defining American Thanksgiving movies because it captures an experience more universal than a holiday meal: the desperate effort to get home when everyone else is trying to do the same thing. Its durability also rests on John Candy’s Del Griffith, whose comic neediness gradually reveals emotional depth without turning the character into a sentimental device. Hughes’s later family comedies often returned to disrupted travel, temporary households, and difficult forms of care, but Planes, Trains and Automobiles remains his clearest synthesis of those concerns. It is frequently remembered for spectacular mishaps—the burned car, motel arguments, cancelled connections—but its legacy comes from the quiet recognition beneath them: belonging is partly the willingness to make room for someone who has nowhere else to go.