Heckerling: National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)

How do you transplant the Griswolds to Europe without losing sight of the picaresque Americana so precious to the Vacation franchise? For National Lampoon’s European Vacation, John Hughes and Amy Heckerling came up with an ingeniously simply answer – turn Europe itself into just another prize on an all-American game show. After coming first place on Pig in a Poke, the Griswolds discover that they’re not only taking home a motorcycle, a dream kitchen and a ten-year supply of car polish, but that they’ve also won an all-expenses paid trip to London, Paris and Germany. Embarking so quickly that you barely register leaving America at all, they settle right back into the comic groove of the first film, although it’s a bit brassier and broader this time around, as if to define them as Americans against Europeans, rather than waspy suburbanites against the inner cities and open fields of middle America. Similarly, there’s a more plastic, cartoony style of humour, with a few musical and fantasy sequences thrown in for good measure, that often recalls the rise of the Zucker comedies, and even develops into something like a Monty Python tribute when Chase is paired with Eric Idle in the British sequences, although all the extras we meet along the way are a bit more exaggerated and theatrical this time around as well, part of what prevents the film ever quite relaxing into the gorgeous languor of Vacation. All of which is to say that the Griswolds still feel like characters on a game show, even once they arrive in Europe – functionally dysfunctional, pooling their weirdnesses in ways that work surprisingly well – where they’re unable to ever quite get their road trip off the ground, as they find themselves perpetually crashing into one car after another, stuck on the wrong side of the street, or trapped on monumental roundabouts that spiral the peripatetic momentum of the first film into something considerably more manic, kinetic and absurd. Of course, the absurdism was there in Vacation as well, but it’s heightened and focused here to the absurdism of American tourists in Europe, or at least the absurdism of a certain kind of American tourist family that simply transplants their own particular slice of heartland oblivion wherever they go. Not only does that cement the Griswolds as the nation’s favourite nation of four – the game show family par excellence - but it actually makes it feel as if we’ve never left America as all – as Dana Hill, playing the best version of Audrey, points out, England looks exactly like New England anyway – especially once they descend on Clark’s relatives in Germany, who are as much of an amusement park as Walley World. In perhaps the most inspired moment of the film, the Griswolds recreate the iconic dash through the Louvre in Bande a Part, as if all it took to fulfil Godard’s dream of a fully Americanised Paris – so palpable in that film in particular –  were a mass influx of credulous, conspicuous American tourists, and the Griswolds in particular, in whose hands Paris becomes a culminated New Wave cityscape, a New Wave film consummated as an American tourist spectacle, with all the sublimity and idiocy – the sublime idiocity – that they've made their own.