The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club, American coming-of-age comedy-drama film, released in 1985, that was written and directed by John Hughes. The movie centers on five high-school students, seemingly with nothing in common, who are forced to spend an all-day detention together in their school library. The Breakfast Club is considered by many to be one of the finest movies about American high-school life ever made and a seminal film of the 1980s.
Summary
The movie’s action takes place on Saturday March 24, 1984, at Shermer High School in fictional Shermer, Illinois. Assigned to detention for various reasons that are revealed during the course of the film, each of the students represents a common teenage archetype: a jock, Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez); a brain, Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall); a beauty, Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald); a rebel, John Bender (Judd Nelson); and a recluse, Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy). During their nine-hour stint in detention—overseen by authoritarian Assistant Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason)—they are instructed to sit quietly and write a 1,000-word essay on the subject of “who you think you are.” The students are initially hostile and antagonistic toward each other but begin to develop a sense of solidarity, particularly after Bender takes a stand against Vernon’s bullying. The group eventually opens up to each other—sharing personal stories, dancing, surreptitiously roaming the school, and revealing vulnerabilities. In the process, they discover that they have more in common than they initially thought. By the end of detention, the five have formed unlikely friendships, and they leave with changed attitudes and perspectives.
The film closes with Brian, heard in voice-over, reading a letter he wrote on behalf of them all in lieu of their essays:
Dear Mr. Vernon…: We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.…You see us as you want to see us…in the simplest terms, with the most convenient definitions.…But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain and an athlete and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club
As the voice-over ends, the film presents its most iconic scene, a view of Bender walking away from the school with his fist raised in triumph while the song “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Scottish rock band Simple Minds blares. The song—written for the movie—became a 1980s teen anthem.
Reception and legacy
- Emilio Estevez (Andrew Clark)
- Judd Nelson (John Bender)
- Molly Ringwald (Claire Standish)
- Ally Sheedy (Allison Reynolds)
- Anthony Michael Hall (Brian Johnson)
- Paul Gleason (Richard Vernon)
- John Kapelos (Carl)
The Breakfast Club is the second film in Hughes’s “teen trilogy,” appearing between Sixteen Candles(1984) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). With its vivid and empathetic portrayal of American teenagers, the film established Hughes as the bard of American youth. The movie also helped launch the careers of its young cast, all of whom were members of “the Brat Pack,” the moniker given to a group of up-and-coming actors by writer David Blum in a June 1985 New York magazine article.
- Studios: Universal Pictures, A&M Films, and Channel Productions
- Director: John Hughes
- Writer: John Hughes
- Music: Keith Forsey
- Running time: 97 minutes
Over the years, the film has received several accolades. In 2016 the National Film Preservation Board—an organization that works to ensure the survival, conservation, and public availability of culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant American films—inducted The Breakfast Club into the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The Criterion Collection film series, which is dedicated to publishing important classic and contemporary films from around the world, released a special edition of the film in two-disc DVD and one-disc Blu-ray formats in 2018.
