They’re not teenagers anymore: the adolescent archetypes who populated The Breakfast Club turn 30 this weekend — the film was released on Feb. 15 in 1985 — and are celebrating with a planned theatrical rerelease.
But, when the movie was originally released, their teen-dom wasn’t necessarily their most salient feature anyway. In a piece for that week’s issue of TIME, critic Richard Corliss took a look at the fact that there were “too damn many” movies for that age group, and that the flood showed no sign of stopping. (It was more than a year later that Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald would be featured on the cover seen here, proof that the reign of the teen queen was yet to peak.) However, he also found that some “teenpix” transcended their demographic bounds, and that Breakfast Club was one of them:
[Filmmaker John] Hughes must refer to this as his ‘”Bergman film”: lots of deep talk and ripping off of psychic scabs. But this film maker is, spookily, inside kids. He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel: why the nerd would carry a fake ID (”So I can vote”), and why the deb would finally be nice to the strange girl (” ‘Cause you’re letting me”). He has learned their dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults. With a minimum of genre pandering—only one Footloose dance imitation—and with the help of his gifted young ensemble, Hughes shows there is a life form after teenpix. It is called goodpix.
Read the full story here, in the TIME Vault: Is There Life After Teenpix?
See the Molly Ringwald cover story here, in the TIME Vault: Ain’t She Sweet?
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