If You Leave

Another movie that I had a chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was Pretty in Pink. It's coming up several times over the next week on the Showtime family of channels, starting tomorrow at 4:50 PM on Showtime Women.

Molly Ringwals plays Andie, a high school senior somewhere in a part of suburbia that isn't completely homogenized. She's clearly from the poor part of town, as we see from the street sweeper operating at the beginning of the movie. She lives with her father Jack (Harry Dean Stanton), who clearly has never gotten over his wife having walked out on him and Andie and hasn't been able to hold down a steady job since. Andie makes do in part with the money she earns from her part time job at the record store with her adult friend Iona (Annie Potts).

Andie has another friend in "Duckie" (Jon Cryer). Duckie is clearly infatuated with Andie, and is doing anything he can to get her to go out with him. But Andie only likes Duckie as a friend (and she's really sincere about that), apparently not thinking at all that she would ever have a relationship with him. In fact, Duckie's incessant pursuit of Andie does cause her problems at times.

One day at the record store, a fellow student, Blane (Andrew McCarthy) comes in, supposedly looking for a record, but we can tell from the conversation that he's trying to determine whether he really is interested in her. This continues in the computer lab, with computers that seem surprisingly advanced for 1986, but that's beside the point. Blane decides that he is interested in Andie, and wants to take her on a date.

But here's the catch. Blane is from the rich part of town, where everybody lives in big houses, and the date is to go to a party at one of those houses. Andie has never even been in one of them, and when she walks in, she finds a bunch of the upper-class students who have no interest in her. Blane takes her upstairs just to talk, but runs into his friend Steff (James Spader) who has another woman in the room with him, clearly with the intention of having sex. Andie doesn't want to be at the party any more, but doesn't want Blane to take her home, because she absolutely doesn't want him to see where she lives.

Blane still loves Andie, and even invites her to the prom, the big event of the year at any high school. But Steff starts working on Blane, suggesting that Blane is likely to suffer ostracism from the other rich kids if he's seen too much with poor Andie. Blane decides to tell Andie he had already promised to take somebody else to the prom, which is of course complete BS, after Andie's father already spent good money on a prom dress. What's a girl like Andie to do?

I have to admit that I'm a couple of years too young for the John Hughes (he wrote the screenplay but didn't actually direct this one) 80s teen movies, having graduated high school in 1990, and only getting to ee them well into adulthood. I also have to admit that I don't quite recognize my own high school experience in Pretty in Pink, mostly because I was definitely neither Duckie nor Blane. I came from one of the more blue-collar parts of the school district, and while we did have a decidedly upper-middle-class section due to having an IBM facility in the district, the economic difference wasn't quite as stark as in Pretty in Pink. Yet, I can still see how a lot of people would identify more than I did, and to an extent I did feel some of the class differences.

The performances are quite good, especially Jon Cryer. He's irritating, although that's because the script requires it. Spader is also very good, even if he looks much too old to be a high school student. Stanton and Potts do well with the supporting adult roles. If you want an interesting look back at high school and the 1980s, then I can highly recommend Pretty in Pink.

I had held off on doing a blog post on Pretty in Pink because one of the times I checked, it seemed to be out of print on DVD. But the movie recently (a couple of weeks ago) received a Blu-ray release, and you can find it on Amazon streaming too.