#19 Hughes,Candy, Death IV--Threnody

Because many on the paternal side of my family have the unfortunate habit of dying of a broken heart, literally, I once asked a doctor-friend--no, the other kind: a physician--"What's the primary symptom of heart disease?" My closest friend for over 50 years and best-man at my first wedding answered, "Sudden death." Ha ha, I thought. Joke between friends. Not. That's the earliest warning sign, ironically, for one-out-of-three of those half-million a year (USA) who die of some form of cardio-pathology. Among celebrity examples, we can remember the shock and disbelief over John Ritter's untimely death a few years ago, and, more recently, Michael Jackson's. It's been 15 years since John Candy's fatal attack--"un-symptomatic" till the end--unexpected but totally understood, given his personal habits and family history. As for John Hughes, hale and fit by all accounts, it happened on a quiet Manhattan morning walking his dog.

Candy and Hughes were good-hearted people too, though I suppose that's too silly an irony. But their movies, as I hoped to make clear already, always had the human heart at the center of things. Along with family, as Hughes got older. Never mean-spirited. That's why their work has been so enormously popular, if not critically acclaimed, from the very good to the not-so-good at all. The latter seemed to happen to them, coincidentally, when CANDY played the lead in a movie without the Hughes connection--Who's Harry Crumb? (same year as Uncle Buck) and too many others--and when HUGHES went on an assembly-line-sequel binge--the Home Alone and "Lampoon Vacation" pluralities--without the Candy connection, at least in a supporting role. To over-simplify a bit. But no question that when properly teamed up, they could make movie magic.

Another reason I'm drawn the Hughes films, and seen most all of them (except those dreadful sequels), is his choice of locale. It connects with my late-teenage years. Despite my Southern roots, I spent a lot of my pre-college days ranging about those same Western and Northwestern suburbs of "Chicagoland"--Lombard up to Lake Forest and into the city itself--that Hughes uses as a backdrop for the majority of his movies. Ferris Bueller's epic landscape was very familiar to me, as were his antics. Ah, nostalgia.

And then there's the odd configuration of morbid numerology that struck me at the announcement of John Hughes' death at age 59. My father was 59 when his first heart-attack hit. He survived, but another one took him out less than two years later. Some fifteen years before Hughes, John Candy died suddenly at age 43. At the time, and being great fans, my family and I couldn't help but notice that he died at the same young age as another one of our bad-gene, infarction-prone, paternal-side relatives. He was my father's brother, Dwight ... my favorite Uncle.
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