Alan Smithee was one of the most prolific directors of the 80s and 90s. His filmography includes Stitches (1985), Let’s Get Harry (1986) and he had a very busy year in 1990 with Gypsy Angels, The Shrimp on the Barbie, Catchfire and Solar Crisis.
Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987) is one of his better 80s efforts, and certainly one of my favorite early Jon Cryer roles.
Alright alright, for the uninitiated, Alan Smithee was the official DGA pseudonym directors used when they wanted to disown a project – a silent protest credit that lasted from 1969 until Burn Hollywood Burn killed the name in 1998 by being so aggressively meta about it that the DGA pretty much retired the whole gag. Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home earned its Smithee when original director Terry Winsor got fired four weeks into shooting and replacement Paul Aaron inherited a production so fragmented he wanted nothing to do with the finished product. It’s the kind of troubled backstory that usually spells disaster.
And yet…
The film got dismissed as a Ferris Bueller wannabe back in ’87, which was probably a lazy shorthand for a teen comedy where a smart kid outmaneuvers clueless adults. But there’s more going on here, Cryer plays Morgan Stewart, a horror-obsessed boarding school exile who gets summoned home to Washington D.C. so his senator father can look more like a family-values man during re-election season. His mother (Lynn Redgrave) thinks his incredible vintage horror collection is practically pornography, his father’s sleazy campaign manager Jay (Paul Gleason) is embezzling funds, and poor Morgan is stuck between parental neglect and political theater. He just wants someone to notice he exists.
The horror fan stuff is surprisingly well-integrated. Morgan meets his love interest Emily (Viveka Davis) in line at a George Romero mall signing (I’ve been there, and done that). There’s a Fulci Zombi 2 poster in the opening shot. A Tobe Hooper-signed toy chainsaw makes an appearance. They watch Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on a date. For a movie that the directors abandoned, somebody clearly loved this stuff.
Cryer, fresh-faced off Pretty in Pink and a couple years before The Famous Teddy Z, brings his patented brand of wounded sincerity to a plot that whiplashes in the third act, lurching into quasi-political thriller territory. It helps to see this messiness is a feature, not a bug – it’s a fascinating mid-80s teen comedy cash-in, the fact that got mangled in production makes it more so.
The few critics that saw it weren’t kind. The New York Times suggested it might find a place in the archives “as an early little movie in which the star wasn’t nearly matched by the material.” But let’s be real, Cryer was matched by the material, he shines. It’s the material that wasn’t matched by the production.
I actually consider it a high point on his 80s resume. The whole vibe is on point, if not the movie, so don’t let a bit of Alan Smithee scare you. This manic pixie movie is well worth the rental. -Pop