Jennifer Connelly wearing a white tank top while riding a mechanical horse. It is an iconic scene. It is probably the only scene anyone remembers in Career Opportunities. It is an undeniably sexy moment. And funny. And maybe a little bit creepy. According to the audio commentary on this new Kino Lorber disc by critic Erik Childress, Universal promoted the film with a cardboard cutout of Connelly on that horse, some kind of mechanism installed to make it move. An image of her costar Frank Whaley was inserted and it was given a tagline like “He’s about to get the ride of his life,” as if this was some kind of raunchy sex comedy. Again, according to the commentary, Connelly has stated that ad helped change her career. She didn’t want to be that kind of actress.
Buy Career Opportunities 4K UHDIn context, it is an interesting scene. She’s riding the horse as a distraction, using her sexuality to throw off two would-be criminals from doing her harm. It clearly works as the camera cuts to the crooks staring at her while eating corn dogs. When the horse stops, she asks for some change to start it again and everybody jumps up. But you don’t get that in the endless parade of gifs that arose in the internet age from a million dorks who no doubt wore out the VHS tape watching that scene.
Career Opportunities was scripted by John Hughes and directed by Bryan Gordon (his first feature, he went on to have a long career directing television). Much like that iconic scene, the film is an odd, mixed-bag. It is sometimes funny, periodically sweet but weirdly paced, and it feels overly long even though its runtime is a short 80 minutes. It did poorly at the box-office and John Hughes disliked it so much he tried to get his name removed from the film before its release.
It came at a strange time in Hughes career. He’d made a name for himself with insightful teen comedies and an ear for authentic dialogue throughout the 1980s. Films like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off turned his name into a brand. But by the late 1980s, he was transitioning into comedies about adults (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; The Great Outdoors; and Uncle Buck to name a few). Soon he’d be writing films like Home Alone (made just one year before Career Opportunities and became the biggest film of Hughes’s career and is why the studio refused to take his name off of this film), which focused on precocious kids. This film feels like one of his teen comedies but its characters are in their twenties, undecided as to how to move into adulthood.
Jim Dodge (Whaley) is the son of a working-class family and a bit of an outsider. He wasn’t popular in school and he can’t decide on a career. He’s introduced being fired from some low-paying job, the last in a long line of such firings. But he’s a bit of a dreamer and schemer. He regularly tells some local kids about his work with the CIA, his rich lifestyle, and other such wild ideas. When he interviews with the manager of Target (John Candy in a cameo) for a night-janitor position, he’s mistaken for a managerial applicant and just rolls with it. He’ll bargain for, and receive, a higher salary before he’s found out.
Josie McClellan (Connelly) is your classic, spoiled, rich girl. She also doesn’t know what to do with her life, but her father has so much money she doesn’t really have to decide. Instead, she finds ways to act out. We first see her being introduced to some of her father’s middle-aged coworkers. She walks up to one, kisses him right on the lips, and gives him a flirtatious smile. She finds herself locked into that Target where Jim works overnight because she had planned to get caught shoplifting but chickened out and fell asleep in the dressing room.
This is a classic John Hughes set-up. Two people from two completely different socioeconomic backgrounds find themselves locked in a confined space for a long period of time. Think The Breakfast Club but inside a department store and with less people. Jim, with his penchant for tall tales and an eye for making the most fun out of any situation, has a bit of Ferris Bueller in him. But then some bumbling crooks show up and it enters Home Alone territory. Like I said, this is a bit of a transitional film for Hughes.
None of it really works. Frank Whaley is interesting as Jim Dodge. His performance is just slightly off. He doesn’t have the boyish charm of Matthew Broderick or the authenticity of Eric Stoltz. He comes off a little weird and a touch loser-ish. Connelly is stunning, but I have to say as a 49-year-old man watching this for the first time since I was a teenager all I could think about is how young she is. Her performance is fine and a little more nuanced than I remembered. It is interesting to observe her initial behavior with Jim and how it changes once the crooks come into it, and then wonder how much she’s manipulating all of them to get what she wants.
The film has none of the buoyancy that made so many John Hughes films from the 1980s so memorable, and it lacks the hilarious lunacy his later work would bring. Instead it just kind of exists like a lump of clay. You can see the possibilities of a classic Hughes comedy in there, and bits of it shine through, but mostly it feels unformed.
Kino Lorber presents Career Opportunities with a new 4K scan of the original 35 mm print. It looks gorgeous for what it is. Mostly set in the florescent world of a Target store, the film never wows you with its lighting and cinematography, but this print does well with what its given.
Extras include the regular Blu-ray disc and the following special features:
- Audio Commentary by Director Bryan Gordon
- Audio Commentary by Chicago Critics Film Festival Producer Erik Childress
- Crafting Criminals: Interview with Actors Dermot and Kieran Mulroney (15:52) (Blu-ray only)
- Interior. Night.: Director of Photography Donald McAlpine on filming Career Opportunities (10:43) (Blu-ray only)
Career Opportunities is both better and worse (depending on what your looking for) than the “Jennifer Connelly riding on a horse” meme implies. It isn’t just some cleavage-staring, male-gazing sex comedy. There are moments when that classic John Hughes romantic comedy-isms shine through, but it also feels very muddled and confused as to what it wants to be. If you are a fan of the film, then this new transfer is well worth the buying. If you are wanting to dive into the world on John Hughes, I’d start elsewhere, moving through his large stable of classics, but I wouldn’t ignore it all together.
