Ferris Bueller's Day Off

John Hughes’s 1986 film fakes an illness and turns a high-schooler loose on Chicago with his friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane, principal Rooney in pursuit. Ferris turns to the camera and talks to us; Cameron never does. That split tells you whose film it is: Ferris pays no price, and only Cameron changes. Alan Ruck was twenty-nine during the shoot, Matthew Broderick twenty-three, and Cameron’s exhaustion feeds on that gap. The parade sequence spans two Saturdays. Chicago’s real Von Steuben Day parade was filmed on 21 September 1985 and the scene staged again a week later, the crowd drawn by a raffle Fred Winston announced on WLS radio. Broderick had hurt his knee, and the choreography was cut back to suit. The Ferrari on screen is not real: three Modena-built replicas of the 250 GT California Spyder stood in. The museum section takes in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte and Chagall’s America Windows; Hughes called it a refuge of his youth. A good fit if you read Ferris’s address to the camera as the structure, not a flourish, and will look for the real story in Cameron. Not for anyone wanting school and family drawn realistically: the principal boarding a school bus during the credits, and Ferris in a bathrobe afterwards sending the audience home, sum up its grip on reality.