School Days

By Frank Rich

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE

Directed by John Landis

Screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller

Before National Lampoon's Animal House, no one ever had the guts to make an honest movie about college life. From Good News to Love Story, from Campus Confidential to The Paper Chase, Hollywood has chosen to regard the campus as a haven for earnest young lovers, gung-ho jocks, inspirational professors and tortured class losers. Animal House, a riotous farce set at fictional Faber College in 1962, presents quite another picture. The film's so-called animals--the inhabitants of Faber's most disreputable fraternity house--are a filthy, outrageous lot. They guzzle and spit beer, drive motorcycles indoors, dump Fizzies in the school swimming pool, pile up 1.2 grade-point averages on their "permanent records" and wreck the homecoming parade. Here, at long last, are movie characters who embody the true spirit of American higher education.

Animal House is the first film project of the National Lampoon, the magazine that prides itself on raising sophomoric yuks to a fearlessly nasty pitch. The movie has the same strengths and weaknesses as its parent publication. At its best it perfectly expresses the fears and loathings of kids who came of age in the late '60's; at its worst Animal House revels in abject silliness. The hilarious highs easily compensate for the puerile lows. A few dumb gags about ROTC thugs and big breasts do not detract from the film's scabrous assaults on undergraduate caste systems, sanctimonious preppies and liberal pieties. Besides, how can one fail to like a campus film that kills off one of the coeds in a kiln explosion?

The film's plot has something to do with the efforts of a mean dean (John Vernon) to shut down the frat house, but it is really just an excuse for a series of bits that are far too hot for TV's Saturday Night Live. We watch the homoerotic rituals of a fraternity initiation and the orgiastic excesses of an all-night "toga" party. In one funny if discomforting scene, white students show up at a black nightspot and try, without notable success, to display some soul. Animal House ends with a where-are-they-now epilogue that demolishes the sentimental finale of American Graffiti, also set in 1962.

The cast is large and talented. Thomas Hulce (the class "wimp"), Stephen Furst (the class "blimp"), James Daughton (a BMOC of ambiguous sexuality) and Karen Allen (as the sexiest of the animals' girls) are much more subtle performers than the material demands. Donald Sutherland, playing Faber's obligatory pot-smoking English prof, and Verna Bloom, as the dean's alcoholic wife, score some wicked points against the postgraduate generation.

Though Director John Landis (The Kentucky Fried Movie) strives for an ensemble effort, he does allow one true star performance--from John Belushi. This Saturday Night Live regular, here making his big-screen debut, may be the funniest fat comic actor since Jackie Gleason. Ill-shaven and semicomatose, Belushi plays the mangiest animal of them all. He does not have many lines, but he is splendid at starting food fights and leading his fraternity brothers in drunken choruses of Louie Louie.

He also has what is probably the film's most telling scene: one night he hoists a lad- der up the side of a sorority house and spies on the coeds through a window. In any other college movie, his efforts would not pay off, but here they do in spades. Belushi's wide eyes take in one gorgeous nude body after another as the girls engage in pillow fights and unmentionable other acts. Yet there is nothing sordid about his voyeurism; it seems almost pure. That is because the Lampoon people understand the darkest secret of an American college education: one of the noblest reasons to go is to spend four years studying sex. --Frank Rich

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