The Emotional Scene Steve Martin Was Surprised Got Cut From ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’
John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles is arguably the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made (sorry, Paul Blart: Mall Cop). But the version we’re all familiar with is famously different from Hughes’ original script.
Hughes shot a ton of scenes that never made it into the final cut for the film’s release, including an entire subplot involving Steve Martin’s character’s wife Susan suspecting her husband of having an affair – which, given the intimacy of the “pillow” scene, he kind of was.
One of the moments that didn’t make it into the movie also happened to be a favorite of Martin’s.
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In the ending of the finished film, Martin’s Neal heads back to the train station to find John Candy’s Del Griffith, at which point Del confesses that he is a widower. His wife, Marie, has been dead for eight years and Del’s been on the road ever since. We then cut to Neal and Del triumphantly carrying his trunk to Neal’s house while every single person in the audience who isn’t a robot happy-cries until they’re dehydrated.
But in the screenplay, Del has a prolonged monologue outlining the tragic story of how his wife died of an illness, they never got to start a family like they always wanted to, and he had to sell his house because he “didn’t much feel like being there” once she was gone.
As Martin recounted in the biography John Candy: A Life in Comedy by Paul Myers, the scene, as written, was “performed so beautifully by John, and he made me cry every time” but it was ultimately “cut down to almost nothing.”
“I remember the line that killed me was when he said, ‘Every year I travel on my own. And every year around the holiday, I latch onto somebody. But this time I couldn’t let it go,’” Martin recalled. “It still makes me cry.”
According to Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ’80s Changed Hollywood Forever by Nick de Semlyen, Candy actually improvised the “but this time I couldn’t let it go” part of the line. Understandably, Martin was taken aback when the heart-wrenching ad-lib wasn’t in the final cut of the film. “It really surprised me,” he said, “because when I was watching the film I thought, ‘Oh boy, here it comes.’”
In 2022, he similarly told The Chicago Sun-Times, “I was surprised the scene was trimmed way down. I never understood why John and I didn’t ask John (Hughes) because that’s his business.”
As noted in Myers’ book, Hughes shortened the scene because its aggressive seriousness “drew unintentional laughs” in test screenings. “It was almost too emotional,” Hughes’ son James Hughes explained, “and slowed down the pace of the movie. (Editor) Paul Hirsch said the film came screeching to a halt in order for everybody to hear his story. John showed some real range in those moments, and in his delivery of those lines and the telling of this story.”
At least he didn’t cut any of Steve Martin’s F-bombs.
