Bachelor Party (1984)

Bachelor Party arrives from 1984 with the confidence of a film that knows precisely what it is and has no intention of apologizing for it. Tom Hanks, pre-stardom, plays Rick Gassko, a Catholic school bus driver who agrees to marry his girlfriend Debbie and then submits to a night of hotel-suite mayhem arranged by his friends. The bride's wealthy parents disapprove. An ex-boyfriend schemes. A donkey appears. The proceedings are loud, drunken, and built on the premise that a wedding is merely the interval before a punchline.

The classificatory apparatus finds remarkably little to occupy it here. The cast is uniformly white, the romance is relentlessly heterosexual, and the female characters exist chiefly as props in somebody else's evening. Brad's repeated suicide attempts are staged as slapstick, which spares us any serious contemplation of his mental state. The wealthy in-laws are villains, but their villainy is snobbery, and snobbery played for laughs is not a critique of capital. The environment goes unmentioned. History goes unmentioned. Nobody learns anything, and nobody explains what we ought to think.

This is, in its way, a kind of purity. The film predates the era in which a comedy might pause to instruct its audience, and it carries no message beyond the pursuit of the next gag. What it offers instead is a 3D fistfight in a movie theater, a trashed hotel suite, and the sight of a young Hanks discovering he can carry a picture. The cultural ledger stays empty. The running time, as a contemporary critic observed, runs about fifteen minutes long. Both facts are noted and filed.