Sixteen Candles

Sixteen Candles
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	John Hughes
Written by	John Hughes
Produced by	Hilton A. Green Michelle Manning Ned Tanen
Starring	Molly Ringwald Paul Dooley Justin Henry Anthony Michael Hall
Cinematography	Bobby Byrne
Edited by	Edward Warschillka
Music by	Ira Newborn
Production companies	Universal Pictures Channel Productions
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date	May 4, 1984 (1984-05-04)
Running time	93 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$6.5 million
Box office	$23.7 million[2]

Sixteen Candles is a 1984 American coming-of-age comedy film starring Molly Ringwald, Michael Schoeffling, and Anthony Michael Hall. It was written and directed by John Hughes in his directorial debut. The film received positive reviews.

Plot[]

In suburban Chicago in 1984, high school sophomore Samantha "Sam" Baker is hopeful her 16th birthday is the beginning of a great new year, but is shocked when her family forgets the occasion because her older, beautiful, self-absorbed sister Ginny is getting married the next day.

At school, Sam fills out a friend’s sex quiz where she reveals her crush on senior Jake Ryan. Meanwhile, Jake, having noticed Sam’s looks at him, asks his friend Rock about her. Rock dismisses her as an immature child, but Jake says he is frustrated by his girlfriend Caroline’s partying ways. On the bus ride home, Sam fends off repeated flirtations from geeky freshman Ted.

At home, Sam's day gets worse when she discovers she must sleep on the sofa because her grandparents and a foreign exchange student named Long Duk Dong are all staying at the house for the wedding. She is further upset when her grandparents also do not remember her birthday and have Dong go with her to a dance at school that night.

At the dance, Sam pines for Jake while Dong has attracted the powerful and strong jock, Marlene. Ted, in an effort to impress his friends Bryce and Wease, dances with Sam, who runs off in tears. In an effort to salvage his reputation with all the geeks, Ted bets Bryce and Wease a dozen floppy disks that he will get physical with Sam before the dance ends. As proof, Bryce and Wease demand Sam’s underwear. Jake asks Ted about Sam, having seen them dancing.

Ted apologizes to Sam who opens up about her family forgetting her birthday and her crush on Jake. Ted tells her that Jake asked about her and Sam is shocked and asks what Ted thinks she should do. Despite his genuine interest in Sam, Ted encourages her to talk to Jake, and she agrees. Before she leaves, he gets her underwear to win his bet and he, Bryce, and Wease charge the other freshmen boys a dollar to see it. Meanwhile, Sam tries to approach Jake, but loses her nerve and runs off. Jake and Caroline leave the dance, leaving Sam thinking Jake doesn’t like her.

At Jake's house, Caroline and her friends have started a wild party. Jake, angry with Caroline, retreats to his bedroom and tries calling Sam, but her grandparents yell at him for waking them up and tell him Sam isn't interested. After the party, Jake is furious at the damage left behind. He finds Ted hiding under a glass coffee table after he knocked over some jocks’ beer can pyramid. Ted tells him Sam is interested in him and Jake confesses that he has lost interest in Caroline. He takes Sam’s underwear from Ted and, in exchange, lets Ted take a drunken Caroline home in his father’s Rolls Royce. To further impress the geeks, Ted stops at Bryce and Wease’s house to get Wease to take a picture of him with Caroline in the expensive car, but the finished picture only reveals the top of Ted’s head.

Sam’s father apologizes for forgetting her birthday and tells her that if Jake doesn’t see what a wonderful person she is, then he isn’t worth Sam’s time. She lies on the couch thinking of Jake not knowing that he is also thinking of her.

The next morning, Sam's mother apologizes to Sam for forgetting her birthday and everyone heads to the church for the wedding. Jake arrives at Sam's house where a hungover Dong miscommunicates that Sam is at church getting married. Jake finds Caroline and Ted making out in the back of his dad's banged-up car and break up. Jake surprises Sam at the church after the wedding and invites her back to his house.

That night, Jake gives Sam her underwear and a birthday cake with 16 candles on it. He tells her to make a wish and she tells him her wish already came true. They kiss as the film fades to black.

Cast[]

Production[]

John Hughes had asked his agent for headshots of young actresses, and among those he received were those of Robin Wright,^[3] Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. Sheedy had auditioned for the role of Sam, but was dropped because Hughes thought Ringwald was more fitting for the role; he called her a year later to give her a role in The Breakfast Club. Inspired by Ringwald's appearance, he put it up over his desk and wrote the film just over a weekend with her in mind for the lead role.^[4][5] For the male lead in the film, it had come down to Schoeffling and Viggo Mortensen.^[6] For the part of Ted, Hughes saw a number of actors for the role (Including Jim Carrey):^[7] "Every single kid who came in to read for the part... did the whole, stereotyped high school nerd thing. You know - thick glasses, ball point pens in the pocket, white socks. But when Michael came in he played it straight, like a real human being. I knew right at that moment that I'd found my geek."^[8]

Sixteen Candles was filmed primarily in and around the Chicago North Shore suburban communities of Evanston, Skokie, and Highland Park, Illinois during the summer of 1983, when leads Ringwald and Hall were 15 years old.^[9] Most of the exterior scenes and some of the interior scenes were filmed at Niles East High School,^[10] close to downtown Skokie, the setting for Hall's driving the Rolls Royce.^[11] A cafeteria scene and a gym scene, were filmed at Niles North High School. The auto shop scene was filmed at Niles East High School in the auto shop. The Baker house is located at 3022 Payne Street in Evanston. The church (Glencoe Union Church - 263 Park Avenue) and parking lot where the final scenes take place are in Glencoe.^[12]

Soundtrack and songs[]

The original soundtrack was released as a specially priced mini album containing only 5 songs. However, the movie actually featured an extensive selection of over 30 songs. Songs from the movie that were not included on the soundtrack EP are as follows:

Home media[]

Pre-2003 releases of the film featured a re-scored soundtrack due to rights issues. This wasn't until 2003 when the film was released on DVD with the original theatrical mix intact albeit in 5.1. In 2008, the film was again released on DVD as a "Flashback Edition" with a new featurette "Celebrating Sixteen Candles". In 2012, the film was released on Blu-ray for the first time as part of Universal's 100th Anniversary with the 2008 featurette carried over along with two new features highlighting the impact of Universal Studios: "The 80s" and "Unforgettable Characters". In 2019, Universal re-released the film on Blu-ray in a digipak highlighting its 35th anniversary. The disc was the same 2012 release with nothing new added. In that same year, Arrow Video announces their release with a new 4K restoration and an extended version albeit 2 minutes longer.

Reception[]

Box office[]

In its opening weekend the film grossed $4,461,520 in 1,240 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking second. By the end of its run, Sixteen Candles grossed $23,686,027 against a budget of $6.5 million.^[2]

Critical response[]

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 84% of critics gave it a positive rating, based on 43 reviews with an average rating of 7.09/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Significantly more mature than the teen raunch comedies that defined the era, Sixteen Candles is shot with compassion and clear respect for its characters and their hang-ups".^[13] Ringwald's performance was especially praised; Variety called her "engaging and credible"^[14] while Roger Ebert wrote that she "provides a perfect center for the story" in "a sweet and funny movie."^[15] Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "a cuter and better-natured teen comedy than most, with the kinds of occasional lapses in taste that probably can't hurt it in the circles for which it is intended. The middle of the film wastes time on a bit more house-wrecking and car-crashing than is absolutely necessary, and there are some notably unfunny ethnic jokes. But most of the movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget."^[16] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "the best teenage comedy since last year's 'Risky Business,'" saying it was "certain to draw a lot of laughs, but the guess here is that it also will offer comfort to young girls and boys who feel awkward. And comfort and moments of recognition are in short supply in teenage movies, which often portray a world of violence and sexual mastery that is a lie."^[17] Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, "It doesn't amount to much, and it's certainly not to be confused with a work of art or a work of any depth, but the young writer-director John Hughes has a knack for making you like the high-school age characters better each time you hear them talk."^[18] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times stated that "'Vacation' worked, for all its raunchiness. 'Sixteen Candles' mixture of the sympathetic and the synthetic, the raucous and the racist, doesn't. At least not for me ... it flails about, substituting chaos and raunchy language for any semblance of wit."^[19] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Hughes isn't vigilant or deft enough to prevent the dramatic focus of attention from shifting at about the halfway point; he can't quite finesse the letdown that sets in when the engaging teen-age heroine, Samantha, delightfully embodied by Molly Ringwald, is allowed to become almost a subsidiary character in the second half of the story. Nevertheless, 'Sixteen Candles' blends an idiosyncratic screwball imagination with a flair for updated domestic comedy and scenes of intimate, quirkily affectionate character interplay."^[20] Metacritic gave the film a score of 61 based on 11 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[21]

Criticism[]

A 1984 review in The New York Times criticized the character of Long Duk Dong for being "unfunny" and a "potentially offensive stereotype" of Asian people.^[22] Conversely, Roger Ebert defended him, writing that Gedde Watanabe "elevates his role from a potentially offensive stereotype to high comedy".^[15] In 2008, Alison MacAdam of NPR wrote, "To some viewers, he represents one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America."^[23] Asian Americans have complained that they were taunted with quotes of his stilted-English lines.^[24]

In an article published in Salon, Amy Benfer considers whether the film directly condones date rape.^[25] After the party scene, Jake tells Ted that his girlfriend Caroline is "in the bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to." He encourages Ted to drive her home saying, "She's so blitzed she won't know the difference." When Caroline and Ted wake up next to each other in the car, Caroline says she's fairly certain they had sex though neither of them remember it. Benfer writes, "The scene only works because people were stupid about date rape at the time. Even in a randy teen comedy, you would never see two sympathetic male characters conspiring to take advantage of a drunk chick these days."^[25]

Author Anthony C. Bleach has argued that one possibility for Caroline's emotional and physical ruin in the film "might be that she is unappreciative of (or unreflective about) her class position", adding that, "What happens to Caroline in the narrative, whether her sloppy drunkenness, her scalping, or the potential for sexual coercion, seems to be both a projection of Samantha's desire to acquire Jake and become his girlfriend and a project of the film's desire to somehow harm the upper class."^[26][27]

Awards[]

In December 1984, Ringwald and Hall both won Young Artist Awards as "Best Young Actress in a Motion Picture" and "Best Young Actor in a Motion Picture" for their roles in the film, respectively becoming the first and only juvenile performers in the history of the Young Artist Awards to win the Best Leading Actress and Best Leading Actor awards for the same film (a distinction the film still retains as of 2014).^[28] In July 2008, the movie was ranked number 49 on Entertainment Weekly's list of "The 50 Best High School Movies".^[29]

Proposed sequel[]

As of 2003, USA Network was developing a sequel to the film.^[30]

As of 2005, Ringwald was producing, saying she had been approached repeatedly but had turned down all previous offers. "I couldn't see how it would work. Now, it seems right."^[31][32] By 2008, Ringwald was campaigning for the sequel, but said she was uncomfortable doing the film without the involvement of Hughes who, at that point, was not interested. Hughes died in 2009. ^[33][34]

References[]

External links[]

Quotations related to Sixteen Candles at Wikiquote

• Sixteen Candles at IMDb
• Sixteen Candles at the TCM Movie Database
• Sixteen Candles at Box Office Mojo
• Sixteen Candles at Rotten Tomatoes
• Sixteen Candles at The 80s Movie Rewind
• "Reflections on Jake Ryan of the John Hughes Film Sixteen Candles" article 2004