Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Based on Wikipedia: Planes, Trains and Automobiles

The Thanksgiving Movie That Almost Wasn't

John Hughes had a problem. His first cut of Planes, Trains and Automobiles ran three hours and forty-five minutes. That's longer than most Thanksgiving dinners.

The year was 1987, and Hughes—known at the time exclusively for teen angst films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off—had ventured into entirely new territory. He'd made a buddy comedy about two middle-aged men trying to get home for the holidays. And somewhere in nearly four hours of footage, buried under subplots about suspicious wives and vengeful pizza delivery boys, was a masterpiece waiting to be carved out.

What emerged after the cutting room floor claimed half the movie would become one of the most beloved comedies ever made. Not just a comedy, actually. A meditation on loneliness, friendship, and the people we meet when our plans fall apart.

The Setup: Everything That Can Go Wrong

The premise is beautifully simple. Neal Page, played by Steve Martin, is an uptight advertising executive in New York City. It's two days before Thanksgiving. He needs to get home to Chicago for dinner with his family. How hard can that be?

Very hard, as it turns out.

His business meeting runs long because a client can't make decisions. He loses a cab to another passenger—a man who will soon become both his tormentor and his salvation. He gets to LaGuardia Airport only to discover his flight is delayed. And when he finally boards, his first-class seat has mysteriously transformed into a cramped coach seat.

Next to Del Griffith.

Del, played by John Candy, sells shower curtain rings for a living. He's chatty. He's friendly. He's the kind of person who tells you his life story while you're trying to read. He's also, it turns out, the same man who stole Neal's cab. And over the next seventy-two hours, he will become inextricably tangled in Neal's life in ways neither of them could have imagined.

The Journey: A Taxonomy of Disaster

A blizzard diverts their plane to Wichita, Kansas. This is the first domino. What follows is a cascade of misfortunes so elaborate it borders on the biblical.

They accidentally swap credit cards at a hotel. They're forced to share a bed—there's only one room available—leading to one of the most quoted scenes in comedy history. A thief breaks into their room and steals their cash. The train they board breaks down in a field in Missouri. The rental car Neal books disappears from the lot, prompting him to deliver an expletive-filled tirade that remains legendary.

Then things get really bad.

Del nearly kills them both by driving the wrong way on a freeway at night. They narrowly avoid colliding with two semi-trucks. And when they finally pull over, Del's carelessly discarded cigarette sets their car on fire. The vehicle they've been driving, it turns out, was rented on Neal's credit card—which Del found in his wallet, used without permission, and then returned. Neal's credit cards are now melting in the inferno.

This is the low point. Neal has no money, no credit, and no transportation. He barters his expensive watch for a motel room and refuses to help Del, who can't afford a room of his own.

The Turn: Something Unexpected

Here's where John Hughes revealed what he was really making. This isn't a slapstick comedy, though it has slapstick moments. It's a film about two men learning to see each other as human beings.

Earlier in the film, after being forced to share that hotel bed in Wichita, Neal loses his temper. He unloads on Del with surgical precision, cataloging every annoying habit, every social transgression, every way Del has made his life miserable. It's brutal and funny and cruel.

Del's response is quiet. He admits his shortcomings. He knows he talks too much. He knows he can be annoying. But he likes himself. And so does his wife.

That moment—the moment where the annoying sidekick reveals his dignity—is what separates this film from a hundred other road trip comedies. Hughes refused to make either character a caricature. Neal isn't just a snob. Del isn't just a buffoon. They're both lonely men trying to get somewhere that matters to them.

Later, at that motel after the car fire, Neal watches Del attempt to sleep outside in freezing temperatures. He hears Del talking to himself, lamenting that whenever he meets someone whose company he genuinely enjoys, he drives them away with his overbearing behavior.

Neal invites him inside. They share drinks. They become, unexpectedly, friends.

The Ending: What Was Really Happening

On Thanksgiving morning, after hitching a ride in the refrigerated trailer of a truck—because of course that's how they'd arrive—Neal and Del finally reach Chicago. They part warmly at a train station. Neal thanks Del for helping him get home. It seems like a happy ending.

But on the train, Neal starts replaying their conversations in his mind. Del's strange silences. His peculiar comments. The way he talked about his wife in the present tense, then deflected when Neal asked to call her.

Neal gets off the train and goes back to the station.

He finds Del sitting alone, surrounded by his luggage.

Del has nowhere to go. His wife died eight years ago. He's been living on the road ever since, moving from city to city, selling shower curtain rings, befriending strangers who will tolerate him for a few days before moving on. He has no home to return to. There is no Thanksgiving dinner waiting for him.

Neal brings him home.

The final shot shows Neal introducing Del to his wife and children. Del is welcomed into the Page family for Thanksgiving. It's sentimental without being saccharine, earned by everything that came before.

What Got Left on the Cutting Room Floor

Those three hours and forty-five minutes of original footage contained entire storylines we never saw. One subplot followed Neal's wife, who became increasingly convinced that her husband was having an affair. This explains something that puzzled viewers for decades: why she seems so genuinely happy to meet Del at the end of the film. In the original version, Del's appearance proves Neal was telling the truth about his chaotic journey.

The thief who robbed their hotel room? He wasn't random. He was the pizza delivery boy from earlier in the film, the one who dropped a case of beer in the hallway. Del had tipped him poorly. He came back for revenge.

And that Wisconsin state trooper who impounds their burnt car near the end? In a deleted scene, he reveals that Del and Neal had actually driven past Chicago entirely. They'd ended up in Wisconsin. This explains why it took them two full days to drive from St. Louis to Chicago—a trip that should take five hours—and why the trooper has a Wisconsin patch on his uniform.

For thirty-five years, these scenes were thought to be lost forever. Then, in 2022, seventy-five minutes of deleted and extended footage was discovered in the John Hughes archive and restored. Paramount released them on a special 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, allowing fans to finally understand the complete version of the story Hughes originally wanted to tell.

Hughes Steps Out of High School

Before Planes, Trains and Automobiles, John Hughes was the poet laureate of teenage alienation. The Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Pretty in Pink. His characters were young, his settings were high schools and suburban bedrooms, and his concerns were first kisses and parental misunderstanding.

This film was different. Steve Martin was forty-two. John Candy was thirty-seven. They played men with mortgages and children and jobs they'd been doing for years. The anxieties weren't about prom dates. They were about making it home in time, about the loneliness of business travel, about the way American life scatters people across the country and makes them strangers.

Critics noticed immediately. Gene Siskel, half of the famous Siskel and Ebert reviewing duo, declared it Candy's best role. Roger Ebert would later include it in his "Great Movies" collection, writing that Martin and Candy "don't play characters; they embody themselves."

What Ebert meant, I think, is that both actors brought their public personas into the film and then revealed the vulnerability underneath. Steve Martin built his career on wild-and-crazy-guy comedy, but here he plays repression and anger and eventual tenderness. John Candy was known for big, broad, lovable performances, but here he shows us the sadness of a man who knows he's too much for most people but can't figure out how to be less.

The Music of Getting Home

The score, composed by Ira Newborn, makes extensive use of an old folk song called "Red River Valley." You've probably heard it even if you don't know the name—it's a melancholy tune about saying goodbye to someone you love. Throughout the film, variations on this melody appear, sometimes as gentle background, sometimes as the raucous rock version recorded by Silicon Teens.

The soundtrack mixed rock, country, and pop in ways that reflected the journey itself. Ray Charles performs "Mess Around." Emmylou Harris covers a Patsy Cline song. Steve Earle and The Dukes contribute "Six Days on the Road," a trucker anthem that fit perfectly with Del and Neal's increasingly desperate transportation choices.

Hughes wanted to use Paul Young's hit version of "Everytime You Go Away" for the final scene and credits. Young himself approved. But the record company refused to license it. Hughes found a cover version by a group called Blue Room instead, and that's what plays as Del walks through the Pages' front door.

Why It Became a Thanksgiving Tradition

The film opened the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. This wasn't an accident. Hughes understood that the movie wasn't just about Thanksgiving—it was about the particular American experience of traveling for Thanksgiving, of crossing the country to sit at a table with family, of the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

It earned nearly fifty million dollars against a fifteen million dollar budget. Not a blockbuster by modern standards, but a solid hit, and more importantly, it never went away. Every November, people return to it. They watch Neal and Del suffer through their odyssey. They laugh at the rental car scene. They cry at the ending.

The film has become a tradition in the same way that certain dishes become traditions. Not because anyone mandated it, but because it captures something true about the holiday. Thanksgiving is about gratitude, yes, but it's also about the difficulty of getting to gratitude. It's about the strangers who become friends, the plans that fall apart, the unexpected gifts of a journey gone wrong.

The Remake That Fell Apart

Hollywood being Hollywood, there have been multiple attempts to remake the film. In 2020, it was announced that Will Smith and Kevin Hart would star in a new version. Kevin Hart confirmed in 2023 that writing was underway. Then, in 2025, the writer announced that the project had "fallen apart."

A separate reboot was announced in 2022, with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler attached to star. Whether that version will actually happen remains to be seen.

There's something almost poetic about these failed remakes. The original film is about the impossibility of planning, about the way life refuses to cooperate with your schedule. Perhaps it's fitting that attempts to recapture its magic keep running into their own unexpected obstacles.

Or perhaps the real reason is simpler: you can't remake chemistry. Steve Martin and John Candy had something that can't be manufactured or replicated. Two men, at the peak of their talents, inhabiting characters so fully that you forget you're watching a performance.

Del Griffith died with John Candy in 1994. There will never be another version of him. There will only be the one we have, sitting alone in a train station, waiting for someone to come back.

The Heart of It

Strip away the slapstick and the disasters and the burning cars, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles is asking a simple question: What do we owe the people we meet along the way?

Neal starts the film treating Del as an obstacle, then an annoyance, then a burden. He ends it treating him as a friend. That journey—the internal one, not the geographic one—is what makes the movie endure.

We've all been Neal at some point. We've all encountered a Del. The person who talks too loud on the airplane. The stranger who doesn't understand boundaries. The colleague who shares too much. Our instinct is to create distance, to protect our precious personal space, to get through the interaction and move on.

But sometimes, if we're paying attention, we notice that the annoying person is lonely. That their excessive friendliness comes from a desperate need to connect. That they're carrying grief we can't see.

Neal notices. He goes back to the station. He brings Del home.

That's the movie's argument, really. Pay attention to the people you meet. Be less protective of your comfort. You might find a friend in the last place you expected to look.

It's a good message for Thanksgiving. It's a good message for any day.