Of course, that's the way the best Dangerfield characters think and act, which may be why they get no respect. In Back to School, Dangerfield is Thornton Melon, an uneducated self-made businessman who earned his millions by founding a successful chain of stores for the larger individual whose name--“Tall & Fat”--is just like Thornton himself in the way it dispenses with formalities and polite euphemisms and simply calls it like it is. Thornton's son, Jason (Keith Gordon), is a college freshman at the fictional Great Lakes University who can't seem to cut it: he isn't accepted into a fraternity, he's pulling all C's, and he didn't make the university dive team. To encourage his son to stay in school, Thornton decides to join him as a freshman, a feat he pulls off by (what else?) donating an academic building, an offer the amusingly named Dean Martin (Ned Beatty) can't resist.

Thus, Back to School is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy in which Thornton the millionaire rube tries to adapt to college life (he's described at one point as “the world's oldest freshman and the walking epitome of the decline of modern education”). He seems to do fine when it comes to partying (one drunken reveler declares the party Thornton throws in his dorm room to be the greatest thing that has ever happened to him), but class schedules and studying don't exactly fit his lifestyle. He also falls in love with his passionate English professor (Sally Kellerman), who is unfortunately dating Dr. Philip Barbay (Paxton Whitehead), the stuffy business professor who becomes Thornton's nemesis both intellectually and romantically.

Whenever Dangerfield is on-screen, Back to School works in the style of a classic Marx Brothers comedy (one of their best being 1932's Horse Feathers, which is set on a college campus). He is also aided by a colorful supporting cast, including the indomitable comedian Sam Kinison as a raging rightwing history professor and Robert Downey Jr. as Jason's Marxist-spouting, antisocial misfit roommate. The film is, like many comedies, a celebration of social outsiders and their ability to kick the establishment where it hurts.

Unfortunately, whenever Dangerfield and the other anarchists are absent and the focus of the film falls on Jason, it doesn't work so well, even though Jason is a fully rounded character and Keith Gordon makes him believably frustrated with both his own inability to fit in and the curse of living in the shadow of his well-meaning, but sometimes overbearing father. It doesn't help that Jason's romantic subplot involves a generic beauty named Valerie Desmond, who is played by Terry Farrell as a vacantly smiling airhead--cute, but completely dull as a love interest. Jason must vie for her nondescript affections by competing with a pompous dive-team stud in a feathered mullet played by William Zabka, who had already perfected the art of being the go-to jerk after playing them so well in The Karate Kid (1984) and Just One of the Guys (1985).

Luckily, Dangerfield dominates most the film, happily upending everything around him. There is a logic to Thornton Melon that feels organic and lived-in, possibly because he's so close to the various characters Dangerfield had been honing on stage and screen since the 1960s. By the mid-1980s, Dangerfield had perfected his “I get no respect” persona, with the bulging eyes, tossed-off one-liners, and sad-sack posture that he seems to be constantly attempting to correct by tugging at his tie (in real life he battled depression, and that deep-seated war with his own emotions gives even his most generic comedy an edge). Given his success, Thornton Melon is no loser except in the eyes of prats like Dr. Barbay, but that's exactly the point: It's people like him who run the world, which is precisely why Dangerfield feels they must be undercut at every turn.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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