HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS
1987
Directed by William Dear
Written by William E. Martin, Ezra D. Rappaport, and William Dear
In 1980 Steven Spielberg (plus Frank Marshall plus Kathleen Kennedy) founded Amblin Entertainment, partly to simply serve as a production company for his own films, but by the mid-80s, what Amblin's purpose appeared to be was to provide a venue by which films of a Spielbergian nature could continue be made, retaining some oversight by Spielberg, while he reconfigured himself towards serious historical chronicles that also might win him Best Picture or Director awards. I'm being glib (and by 1993 Spielberg had realized he could just do both things), and flattening "Amblin films" into their most reductive stereotype (though the stereotype fits and the vast majority of non-Spielberg Amblin, 1980-1990, is family-oriented genre work bearing a light, but not too light, and never insincere—what we have already termed "the Spielbergian"—touch), but while Amblin's cultural highwater mark viz. its non-Spielberg Spielbergianism probably came in 1985 (the year of Back To the Future and The Goonies), 1987 might've witnessed Amblin at peak efficiency and in greatest accord with that purpose I've glibly identified. After all, the company that produced Gremlins and Back To the Future had, with those, produced Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis movies. Yet in 1987, while Spielberg did Empire of the Sun—most serious—released two unmistakable, bona fide knock-offs of Spielberg's biggest family-friendly hit to date, E.T., with *batteries not included and, before that, today's subject, Harry and the Hendersons; let us not doubt that they were made to be as Spielbergian as possible.
Of E.T.'s numerous imitators, there aren't many that I value more highly than these two Amblin made themselves. There's a very pronounced house style to them, predominating over their credited directors—for Amblin was the industry leader in "suburban mystery"—but that's obviously one hell of a house style, and we can readily assume that those directors submitted themselves to it wholeheartedly. With Harry and the Hendersons' director, William Dear, not having any big-budget track record (though it cost but a mind-bogglingly modest $10 million), it was perhaps deliberate that Amblin assigned him what we could call Spielberg's proxies: not only E.T.'s cinematographer, Allen Daviau (who, in fairness, seems to have known Dear already, introducing him to Spielberg), but also E.T.'s production designer, Jim Bissell, the latter of whom also served this film—I'd say unusually—as second unit director.
Yet it was Dear's own project, the one he pitched to Spielberg after Spielberg rescued him from obscurity by giving him an Amazing Stories episode in 1985. Before then, Dear was languishing: his directorial career started in 1973 with worrisome-sounding sexploitation (the tagline of his debut, Nymph: "underage and overeager"), and he directed an outlaw biker film in 1976, which seems late to still be knocking off The Wild Angels; more recently he'd become associated with ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith (and so presumably even doing important work in codifying "the music video" that was presently becoming a big deal), though with motorcycles and Monkees in his eyes, in 1982 he made Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, an almost-fun B-minus-movie effectively summed up, "time travel flick about a dirtbike racer fighting cowboys while all of them fight forty minutes of padding and Nesmith's questionable score." Timerider, you understand, failed to set the world afire. This is when Spielberg entered the picture, but in-between Dear had also made the acquaintance of William Martin and Ezra Rappaport, who'd had an idea for a sitcom about a family who adopted a sasquatch, I'd suspect after watching Spielberg's 1982 magical friend movie. (Though give 'em credit for getting the jump on ALF, even if their movie didn't.) Dear thought it should be a feature—given the gulf between the film and the small-screen adaptation it actually got in 1989, I'd agree—and when Spielberg asked Dear for a pitch, naturally the one he gave him was T: The Terrestrial.
So, in the Pacific Northwest rainforest, a family is about to meet something else. These are the Hendersons: gun store co-owner George (John Lithgow), his wife Nan (Melinda Dillon), elder daughter Sarah (Margaret Langrick), and younger son Ernie (Joshua Rudoy); the main purpose of the trip seems to be to get Ernie his first kill, a rabbit. On their way out of the woods, however, George accidentally bags some much bigger game with his car: this is the sasquatch, the bigfoot, the missing link, whom we'll call "Harry" (Kevin Peter Hall)—you get it—though he doesn't acquire that name till later. Believing he's killed the cryptid, George recognizes its scientific and monetary value, and decides to bring the corpse home—when Harry regains consciousness, flying off the roof when George hard-brakes in terror, George is doubly-sure he's dead—but Harry is still only stunned, and wakes again while the family is sleeping, or trying to sleep, George's dreams already troubled by his guilt.
For the moment, however, he has a bigfoot tearing the shit out of his house (and judging his lifestyle: Harry, a vegetarian,* ain't too thrilled by George's hunting trophies), though the police won't be much help because the moral of all cryptid horror is, "when you call 911, tell them it's a bear." After a harrowing night, George has to decide whether to keep Harry until he figures out how to monetize his discovery, perhaps sufficient to pay for the thousands of dollars of damage accrued each hour Harry stays, or return him to the Cascades. He reluctantly chooses "the Cascades" but he (and Harry) screw it up, and Harry gets himself lost in Seattle, and George, by now quite imprinted on his new friend, clutches at every bigfoot-related clue—for finding Harry has become urgent, as rumor of the creature spreads. George just manages to get to Harry ahead of the swarm of gun-toting morons who've decided to kill him (morons whom George has largely equipped himself), but what George doesn't know is that amongst the usual morons is a certain LaFleur (David Suchet), your genuine-article great white hunter who's devoted his crazy life to killing a sasquatch. In the end, it's up to the Hendersons and LaFleur's own erstwhile colleague, fellow bigfoot nut Dr. Wrightwood (Don Ameche), to deliver Harry from danger and back to where he belongs.
We might identify the obvious way this departs from the template: this magical friend is almost exclusively about a grown-up. (It's curious how many parallels it has with *batteries not included's "magical friends for geriatrics.") Hypothetically, it's "about" Harry's effect on all the Hendersons; this just isn't true. It's barely true for Nan, and less true for the kids. Even if it's hard to identify any moment where you could accuse Dear of unfairly ignoring them, or failing to integrate them into his rework of Martin & Rappaport's screenplay, it's also the case that Nan's major function is to be a largely-ignored voice of reason, while the kids simply complete George's Very Average Family (Nan should be 30% pregnant) while headlining the occasional amusing interstitial sketch. So in a movie that I'll get ahead of myself to declare chock-full of outstanding acting, the nicest thing to say about Langrick and Rudoy is that they're ably doing what they've been asked ("almost-psychotically self-centered teen" and "shrill, oblivious pre-adolescent," respectively) and yet, Rudoy particularly, I don't know if they should've been. Sometimes the kids are outright subtractive, especially since they're a big way the screenplay stumbles over its own feet to almost immediately neutralize Harry, notably in Sarah's badly suspension-of-disbelief-testing chastisement of the furry giant smashing her house, whom she's known for all of 120 seconds, so who might very well still rip all their heads off, though, in fairness, she's furious about his supreme faux-pas of eating her birthday corsage.
This screenplay has its deficiencies, then, and while I just identified the most salient, that's just a disorientingly-bad scenelet inside an otherwise-great whole sequence. It's more a manifestation of the film's initial problem, which is that its plot doesn't wholly "click" for a goodly while. This will be obscured, but this 110-minute family film almost feels too short, or at least like its no. 1 priority ("get to Harry now") means forcing its characterizations of the Hendersons through brutally-constrained channels. (Structurally, it's actually odd: basically two compressed-but-almost-real-time sequences of about forty minutes apiece—"meeting Harry," "saving Harry"—that I might not call "acts," connected by an intentionally-dithering, tense-about-the-dithering middle; it's not, by necessity, "incorrect," but could be where some issues arise.)
Anyhow, George, being the only real character the Hendersons have, gets it the worst, spending a whole first almost-an-hour being churned through shifting motivations that barely justify the movie's need to put the Hendersons in proximity to Harry, rather than goals a rational person or even this person would pursue; and, sometime in the middle, nature-raping George is suddenly revealed to have been a different character all along, afforded a subplot regarding his barely-seen boss-dad's (M. Emmet Walsh's**) trampling of his sensitivity and artistic aspirations in favor of making him into one more gun-toting moron—this is emphatically a movie "about masculinity," and even good at that—but with the only set-up for that being a line wedged into the Hendersons' pre-collision conversations that you almost certainly missed.
It's a quandary: I think if you squinted the right way, Harry and the Hendersons could be perceived as patient, even layered, but it also slightly feels like Dear's rework wasn't as complete as it should've been, hence Sarah treating Harry like a harmless dumb sibling even though that hasn't been established yet, and hence George, the artist with the soul of a wounded child, "established" by going back and inserting one throwaway line forty pages earlier.***
Well: the script firms up, but even before that, it already has Lithgow, whom you find in this period bouncing between the extremes of extra-nasty villains and sweet(er)-natured roles more like this one. This is perhaps his defining performance in the latter mode: Lithgow is an enormous component of that "great acting" I mentioned, forging a much more coherent "George Henderson" than was written (not-entirely-single-handedly, because Dear and editor Donn Cambern are providing him every opportunity to do it), ensuring that George's maelstrom of justifications for keeping Harry feel more like post hoc rationalizations, and doing as much as possible to communicate that his hunting shtick is a threadbare costume, and—the instant it's feasible—making it clear beyond all doubt that George has fallen in love. And of course, far beyond a strategy to keep the screenplay from flying apart, that's extraordinary: this movie, Lithgow, and his co-star are fearlessly committed to this innocent love between a bigfoot and his man, expressed in many ways, but not least the movie's go-to trick of having them frequently gaze into one another's souls, pointedly unconcerned with how easy it is to make an adolescent joke out of it, which I admit I have done, and am to some degree doing even now, to emphasize how impervious it is to sarcastic bullshit. And yet it is a hugely funny comedy, from the smallest reactions from our ambiguously-comprehending sasquatch to a surfeit of fully-structured gags, like the editing-driven "he didn't like the blue cheese."
As for the secondary cast, let's mention that Dillon is astoundingly engaged with her thanklessly-instrumental role (seriously, watch her face sometimes when Lithgow's talking), and if the Academy needed to give Ameche a "still alive" Oscar, too bad it wasn't for this instead of Cocoon, given Ameche's much more interesting performance here as a burnt-out former bigfoot researcher whose ecstasy at beholding the miracle he'd stopped believing in is persuasive and heartmelting. The same goes for Suchet, who's managing an awfully sly performance for a fundamentally comic antagonist (incidentally, Dear's dedication to making every scene memorable is made apparent in the visual comedy of a garbage-coated, stinky LeFleur pacing in a Seattle jail and driving his cellmates around like a frightened herd) because Suchet can, when the movie needs him to, reclaim the spiky menace you'd think buttmonkeying around the margins of a silly story would've stripped him of. Also, this being an 80s movie (one I hadn't seen in decades), LeFleur's denouement with Harry had me on eggshells, Dear making it feel like it could have gone gnarly, even if that wouldn't have been the right choice for this movie made of sweetness and light; Suchet's just as swell at receiving nature's, essentially God's, grace.
But of course I'm saving the best for last, the creation that is Harry. In June 1987 you could've made a Kevin Peter Hall anti-hunting double-feature with Predator (his Predatorness obviously not being very apparent, except that in the direst stretch of his second battle with LaFleur, it is; so a quibble I'd make is that defusing that with testicular slapstick wasn't the right choice), and here we have Hall ensconced in the immaculately-convincing suits Rick Baker designed under Dear's most important injunction, which was that Harry's eyes must be Hall's eyes. (His second-most-important injunction: get the 7'2" Hall up to 8'+, dwarfing even the 6'4" Lithgow.) I'd managed to get this backwards in my initial research, which led me to say, "holy God, what profoundly expressive robotic eyes"—it sure makes more sense now—but we must consider it a composite performance, requiring up to five people, thanks to the "basically witchcraft" sophisticated animatronics hidden in the suit's ovoid cranium, the on-set radio puppetry effected by Tom Hester, Tim Lawrence, and Baker himself, and the supervision of choreographer Nancy Gregory, all necessary to achieve these big, open-hearted facial expressions on behalf Hall's big, open-hearted physical performance, that itself is finding in Harry an elemental, superhuman force that's the epitome of peaceful calm, like walking quietly through the forest or sitting by the side of the lake—somehow, because his major operating mode's still funny mischief. Dear, discussing his movie, has a marked tendency to slip into describing "Harry's" performance—mind you, it never comes off like a dismissal of Hall's performance—and I can see how it happens, because Harry almost instantaneously stops reading as a "special effect." Even in a career as storied as Baker's, "Harry" is his single greatest work; and even with the Predator, it's Hall's own signature role, especially considering he reprised it on the TV show until his tragic passing in 1991.
And boy do these performers get their workout in this superbly kinetic film. It's also a jaw-droppingly gorgeous one: I mentioned Daviau's cinematography, and I'm not sure this isn't also his best work, in an uneven career that, still, had some blatantly huge peaks. The attention to just the sun passing is gratifying in the opening sequence, with its beautiful location photography (likewise the finale's location photography, which is burdened with intercut studio shooting, though it had to be); but then the Hendersons' soundstage-based house gets treated within some intoxicatingly good studio night, especially in that critical moment where George is about to murder Harry and the peaceful giant looms out of the chiaroscuro to give us our first soulful stare between our two intertwined hominids (a tremendously great moment for Hall, suggesting that he understands George could kill him); Daviau is as important for the excitement of the multi-party chase through the nighttime streets of Seattle, between the dashes of unpleasant red lighting and the downright nerve-jangling coruscation of streetlights that intermittently illuminate Harry and LeFleur inside a moving garbage truck, and—not that a movie needs to be too damn consistent—Harry innocently inspects the pistol that LeFleur is a split-second away from pulling the trigger on; and I quite admire his lensing when Harry's being a background gag, just slightly out-of-focus.
Daviau's masterpiece comes early: George's very first face-to-face with a conscious and ambulatory bigfoot and the monstrous shadows the latter throws across the walls thanks to a spinning, red-rimmed flashlight, horror-inflected and the most exquisitely Spielbergian visual gesture of them all. Meanwhile, Bissell's production design is roughly as excellent, adjusting for how there's rather less "production design" here; but the Henderson home is fantastic thanks to the gimmicks needed to achieve all the absurd effects of Harry wrecking the joint (Hall's great, but these stuntguys had their work cut out). Perhaps because of the fact the movie is mostly just quotidian spaces, the art department went nuts with Woodwright's museum, cluttering it with all the hokey bigfoot crap anyone could ask for out, all so Daviau could fill it with diffuse light and treat it, bizarrely, like some sacred cave, testament to a set that Dear loved so much he had to remind himself he didn't require hours' worth of coverage for a two-minute scene.
Back when discussing *batteries not included, I held forth on 80s nostalgia and its wherefores. Harry and the Hendersons is certainly part of the explanation. (I mean, there are jokes about its ending being legendarily-affecting, but those "jokes" work because everybody knows you're not kidding.) So it's a movie that isn't "original," and doesn't pretend it is, but remains incredibly creative within that absence of originality; it's a message movie, with a fine message, that's infinitely sincere but always fun; it's a family film completely confident in its own value as entertainment, but also as art, wide open to the charge of "disposability" and yet nonetheless a film that convinced its collection of talent to offer work worthy of the pinnacles of their crafts. Sometimes the answer to "why nostalgia?" simply has to be a "can you tell me why not?"
Score: 10/10
*Actually a pescatarian, this movie expending enough energy wagging its shaming finger in support of this idiosyncrasy that I'd guess one or more screenwriters were pescatarians, and wanted to draw attention to the specific mode of living they'd deemed righteous.
**Not an exceedingly plausible "dad of John Lithgow."
**Yet George's artistic dreams were important enough to Dear that the end credits clipshow presents itself in the fullest-blown "Take On Me" rotoscope-sketch style imaginable—cool! though it doesn't much match "George's" illustration style (which, as we'll see, is Rick Baker's illustration style, which has a mild Richard Gammell vibe even when it's succeeding in being "nice" to Harry). Meanwhile, this rip-off of "Take On Me," whose animation producer was John Beug, is credited to an animation-producer-with-no-other-credits named John Belig. Hmmmmmmmm.
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