Back to School, which affirms Dangerfield's rueful fixation with material wealth after the nominally edgier Easy Money (not to mention Caddyshack), remains a fine showcase for the charms of the erstwhile "Rappin' Rodney"; unfortunately, fourteen years after its release, the whole affair feels a bit stale. Dangerfield stars as Thornton Melon, a dropout who made the big-time by launching a chain of clothing stores for the overweight. Thornton's true pride and joy is not his business but rather his son, Jason (Keith Gordon, now a director), a college freshman struggling to fit in on campus. Fresh from another failed marriage, Thornton decides to lend Jason his support by enrolling in classes alongside him, a gesture that also entails renovating Jason's dorm room (to furnish it with couches, a big-screen TV, and a hot tub) and replacing his used textbooks with the latest editions. But the tycoon quickly becomes a party animal and loses interest in his studies. A lack of self-discipline is why he never continued his education in the first place.

A sexy teacher (Sally Kellerman) encourages Thornton to try harder instead of hiring people (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and NASA officials among them!) to do his homework. Soon, he has stolen her affections from a crusty economics professor named Phillip Barbay (Paxton Whitehead, whose real name conjures a stronger mental picture of a snivelling, overpriveleged killjoy), leading the doctor to launch a campaign for Thornton's expulsion. Will our hero prove his intellectual worth at an oral exam? Will he then save the day at a diving meet with the patented Triple Lindy? It's all very sweet and well intentioned, and earnest supporting performances bring out the warmest in Dangerfield, but Back to School's time-depleted (maturity-depleted?) laugh quotient renders the film something closer to a relic than a classic. Although the bug-eyed funnyman undeniably had some credibility at the cinema for a fleeting moment in 1986, the smash success of Back to School may have actually hurt his career, as future pleas for respect rang hollow. His schadenfreudic appeal, after all, is rooted in his desire for esteem; that he waited years to make another movie also contributed to the demise of his box-office worth.

The eighties were a largely unironic time for comedy. (I recall wearing out my Weird Al records and indulging in infinite teen-party pics.) Of all the clown princes from that era, my favourite was the perennial loser Dangerfield, whose shtick was to spit out a succession of self-defeating one-liners with such machine gun intensity that the jokes themselves became irrelevant to the sum total of the onslaught: you felt as if you'd just heard a lifetime of anguish in two minutes and laughed at such a prospect. These pitiable verbal assaults made him more than just a donut-binging gloss on Henny Youngman; the famous Youngman quip "Take my wife, please," became, in Dangerfield's hands, "During sex my girlfriend always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel." And that's probably why he's not hip today, because the trend of popular comedians has swung back to pointing their powers of critical perception at everything but the mirror.

I won't expend much effort discussing Back to School's DVD, because it's obvious that none was expended on its mastering. The disc appears to have originated with a grainy, badly-contrasted analog source dating back perhaps as far as the film's home video debut. Black mattes have been placed on the beat-up-looking image with no regard for framing accuracy. (Widescreen bands twice obscure the opening credits.) Thankfully, a full-frame version is contained on the flipside--and how often do you hear me say that? The Dolby Surround soundmix is flat though not entirely lifeless: the Oingo Boingo song sounds decent. Extras include the original theatrical trailer plus a two-page booklet full of Back to School trivia.-Bill Chambers

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