There is a remarkably effective scene early in this comedy in which an English professor lectures his class on the works of Milton. "Now, was Milton trying to say that being bad is more fun than being good?" he says, immediately thereafter biting into an apple. The scenario - and its accompanying visual punchline - is just so perfectly subtextual and archetypal, just so RIGHT, that it elevates this hilarious portrait of 1960s college life to the firmament of genius. Indeed, what sane individual would not choose the happy-go-lucky hedonism of the apelike Bluto Blutarsky over the stern, self-imposed WASP misery of the American patrician class? As the college hijinks spin gleefully out of control, one eventually comes to the realization that chaos, when tempered by the spirit of guileless fun, is infinitely preferable to the vacuum of order. It's John Landis' paean to good old-fashioned mischief, and its winning exuberance manages to carry the day despite the movie's more subversive undercurrents. With John Belushi, John Vernon, Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, Mark Metcalf, and Donald Sutherland.
Review of National Lampoon's Animal House
