The Summer Of Sex Comedies: ‘Risky Business’ Gives Rise To A Wild, Multi-Decade Run Of Horny House Parties 

In recent years, social media has revealed a new prudery among younger movie watchers, too tiresome to describe in much detail, but kind of boiling down to a directive that sex scenes are only permissible in movies if they “advance the story.” Now, of course, in the genre of sex comedy, sex IS the story — whether there are scenes overtly depicting the sex act or not. Over the next several weeks in his new series The Summer Of Sex Comedies, Decider contributor Glenn Kenny will provide a guided tour of the permutations of the sex comedy (from innuendo to full frontal nudity) as well as its various luminaries (from Marilyn Monroe to Jennifer Lawrence). So even if no noteworthy new sex comedies come up in the next few months, you can still have a pretty hot cinematic summer.

We’ve already gone over how National Lampoon’s Animal House revived the then-dormant early ‘60s relic known as the “Toga Party.” Toga parties were originally, we saw, held at frat houses; the members of those houses were permitted to manage those houses as a kind of rehearsal for adulthood, a way of demonstrating that they could be responsible stewards of property. And the Toga Party deliberately demonstrated the fallacy of this presumption. 

In the absence of authority, teens and late teens are going to act irresponsibly before their parents have even pulled out of the driveway. It’s human nature. Pretty much the entirety of Risky Business, a sharp, smart, surprisingly sensitive 1983 teen comedy written and directed by Paul Brickman and starring Tom Cruise at his most ingratiatingly unstoppable, took this immutable law down some novel pathways. On the one hand, it’s a perversely fairy-tale-like wish fulfillment narrative. After checking off one box on the “when the cat’s away, the mouse will play” list by lip-syncing to Bob Seger in his briefs, Joel then calls for an escort. After a transphobic misunderstanding that’s the movie’s most oppressive sour note, he meets Lana, played by the gorgeous Rebecca De Mornay, who not only gives his ashes a thorough raking, as the Brits say (I think that’s what they say), but finds Joel rather appealing, so much so that she feels kind of bad about having her associates loot his house and stuff. Once that misunderstanding, and others, including a waterlogged luxury car, are cleared up, she and Joel become lovers for real. The movie, um, climaxes with a huge house party in which Joel’s ancestral home is transformed, for one night only, into a brothel. One that’s attended by his Princeton admissions office, as it turns out. (It’s interesting to remember that Brickman’s original, mildly downbeat ending was not accepted by the film’s producers, and the precedent of Tom Cruise getting away with everything was henceforth codified.)

The movie benefitted from the truth that was bluntly articulated the year before in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, which was that, yes, teenagers have sex. In Fast Times the sex wasn’t always entirely consensual and it also sometimes had unintended consequences, like, you know, pregnancy and then a termination of that pregnancy. Yikes.  But Risky Business took a much breezier view of this. The consequences of sex here are more ostensibly comedic — “Guido the killer pimp” indeed.  And as a bonus, Business had the young callow male getting schooled in the act of love by a woman both a tad older and much more experienced — and gorgeous to boot. 

Two films that used the same trope actually predated Risky Business, one by a couple of weeks, another by a couple of months. 

Class, released in July of ’83, featured Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy as prep school frenemies. On a trip to Chicago (and this isn’t even a John Hughes movie!), McCarthy’s Jonathan meets ravishing older woman Ellen, played by ravishing Jacqueline Bisset. He accepts his seduction (he is, in fact, in Chicago on a sex mission, so to speak) and later learns that Ellen is the mother of Lowe’s Skip. Yikes. The movie is helmed by Lewis John Carlino, a thoughtful director of intense domestic dramas (including 1979’s  The Great Santini, featuring a career high performance from Robert Duvall as the ultimate hardass dad) who also had a line in moody sex dramas (1976’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, for which the stars Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles recreated their sex scenes for a Playboy pictorial still fondly remembered to this day). But his thoughtfulness didn’t apply too hard here — Class is an often cringe-inducing, tonally schizoid mess. Its central conceit is kind of a lateral move from that of The Graduate, and a signpost to American Pie’s canonical concept of the MILF. (We’ll get to that later, obviously.) 

More purposefully frothy was March 1983’s My Tutor, in which gruff dad Kevin McCarthy (no relation to Andrew) hires the very attractive Caren Kaye, as Terry, to get his son’s French up to speed so he’ll be admitted to Yale. (The object of College Acceptance Desire in Risky Business was, we will recall, Princeton.) Given that said son, Bobby, is played by the hunky Matt Lattanzi (who would soon marry his Xanadu co-star Olivia Newton John, with whom he had an 11-year union), one figures he has few problems with love language, and this has the effect of making the whole enterprise seem pretty low stakes. Notwithstanding the plot device of having Bobby’s dad give Terry the outlandish fee of $10,000, which revelation confuses Matt with respect to the sincerity of Terry’s affections. As we’ve learned from the recent Materialists, money not only changes everything, it tends to confuse everything as well. 

The older-woman/younger man bit got a perky/cute reset with last year’s The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway found herself in a clinch with a dude from her teen daughter’s favorite boy band, a consummation that could not have even been dreamed of in the era of The Graduate. The wild party bit from Risky Business has proven far more reliable and rebootable. We mentioned John Hughes above; his directorial debut, 1984’s Sixteen Candles, aside from blessing the world with Molly Ringwald in her first starring role (what? you missed her in Mazursky’s 1982 Tempest?), features a party-out-of-bounds sequence that alienates Jake, the nice high school jock on whom Ringwald’s Samantha has a crush. You may recall the film’s unusual happy ending, in which Jake presents Samantha with her own underwear.

In Candles, the party is a plot point. In 1998’s Can’t Hardly Wait, though, it’s the whole plot. A high-school graduation party serves as a microcosm of the myriad social hierarchies of teen heaven/hell. Written and directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, it’s an ostensibly good-hearted picture whose perhaps inadvertent sub-theme is the question of who deserves to have sex, and with whom. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays Amanda, the prom queen with whom no one is going to have sex that evening. Although she is newly single, having been dumped by Peter Facinelli’s supremely loutish Mike. Ethan Embry’s Preston is the boy who loves Amanda truly madly and deeply and has done so since freshman year. Because he’s a soulful guy, he sees the party as an opportunity to profess his love, not to hit it. As the extremely irritating wannabe, um, gangsta rapper Kenny, Seth Green bops through the movie in what one might call a hopeless state, except that the appealing Denise, played by the appealing Lauren Ambrose, sees him for who he really is (which the audience never quite does, frankly), and lets him know how much she appreciates him in one of the house’s capacious bathrooms. Truly, neither romance nor chivalry is dead. 

But the wild teen party movie kind of is, for now, it seems. An arguable final nail in its coffin came with 2012’s Project X, a slipshod crock of “found footage” shite which tries to go the motorcycle-up-a-flight-of-indoor-stairs gag from Animal House one better by having a party attendee arrive with a flamethrower. The buoyant and improper sarcasm of the 1978 film is hear replaced with genuine mean-spiritedness. The overall slovenly nature of the enterprises is reflected in the title, which had been a production placeholder and was then attached to the final product as no one could be bothered to come up with anything better. 

But fear not. In other subgenres, the sex comedy thrived. Next time, we look at one that started a franchise, and another that was actually good (and so, did not). 

IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF “THE SUMMER OF SEX COMEDIES”: You can probably take these guys home to for a dinner with your family without having to worry that Mom won’t approve, but that doesn’t mean they’re not horny as hell. Say hello to the geeks who want to get some: John Cusack, Steve Carell, and more.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.