Just once in his life, a man has his time
And my time is now, and I’m coming alive. Sunday musical excursion #54.
Image: Canadian athlete Rick Hansen.1
Ranked by some as the worst movie ever, St Elmo’s Fire (1985) came so hot on the heels of The Breakfast Club (which likewise featured Brat Pack actors Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez) as to almost suggest that it was the 1984 film’s sequel. In a way it was, but the cast similarities were more coincidence than anything else, its said three actors having been suggested by the Club’s director John Hughes after the Fire’s concept proved a hard sell at the studios and among the favoured acting talent.
The Breakfast Club tells the story of a group of kids who have been recalled to their high school on a Saturday morning for a period of detention (which I found amusing, having had Saturday morning lessons throughout my scholastic career anyway). The kids are of an age when some of them may be on the cusp of entering tertiary education, and St Elmo’s Fire, by contrast, bookends that by depicting a group of university students just post-graduation, as they start to put out feelers for where they are headed in life.
The year the film came out, 1985, was the year I myself graduated from university (for the second time, the first having been in the year of The Breakfast Club), and so it was a coming-of-age experience for me, especially as I was introduced to it in the summer of that year on the aircraft that took me on my first visit to the country where it had been filmed. Just once in his life, a man has his time …
I see it has a ranking of 44 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, and quite honestly I don’t give a fig. I loved the performances by all the actors, especially the ditzy Demi Moore, the wet-lipped Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy (he flicks his cigarette ash into the food cooking on the stove, as Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy disappear for some whoopee) and Emilio Estevez, who is besotted by Andie MacDowell and went on to have a most illustrious career (as Billy the Kid in Young Guns, and directing and starring as a philanthropic bank robber in Wisdom (no, not Norman)). St Elmo’s Fire features an AMC Jeep CJ5 in forest green, which those who know me will understand sold me on the film from the start. Ten years later, I bought my own Chrysler Jeep YJ, and fulfilled a dream whose spark lay in St Elmo’s Fire. I told you it was coming of age: I still have the car and haven’t quite yet made it into adulthood. … And my time is now, and has been ever since.
It’s (the film, that is) set in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. but the university there refused permission to film because it contained that scene with Nelson and Sheedy going off for some pre-marital sex. (Yes, I know. Jesuits, you understand.) So it’s actually shot in Maryland just up the road from the actual setting, where morals run fast and loose, it would seem.
One criticism of the film was that it had less a coherent plot and was more a series of vignettes, and I agree, and that was precisely its attraction: for anyone facing the world at the same time of their life as the band of seven in St Elmo’s Fire, they could identify a part of themselves in each one of those episodes. I think if you were of an age with these characters, the film meant more to you than if you were older, and were judging them from an age distance.
The title of this post is a line from another song in the film: St Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion), which was written by the Canadian composer of the tune below together with Englishman John Parr, who sings it. Parr later said of that song, “[Director Joel Schumacher] wanted a song about determination. He wanted a song about kids who are growing up and have to make decisions about what to do with their lives. That’s what the movie is about. In the movie, St. Elmo’s is a bar. But to me, St. Elmo’s Fire is a magical thing glowing in the sky that holds destiny to someone. It’s mystical and sacred. It’s where paradise lies, like the end of the rainbow.” That’s also what I felt when I watched the film in that British Airways jetliner. Of course, the end of the rainbow is illusory, as we all know … That song’s title (but not the film itself) was also inspired by wheelchair-bound Canadian Olympian Rick Hansen, who was touring at the time to raise awareness of spinal injuries (the Man in Motion Tour). The words therefore also transpose to that campaign of his, which is still vibrant to this day as it endeavours to reframe disability as ability.
The clip is of the movie’s love theme, however; it also features (albeit only on the soundtrack album) as a vocal sung by Donny Gerrard and Amy Holland, but this is the instrumental version, from the actual film. The video comprises a variety of key shots from the movie, including McCarthy and Estevez in the laundrette, with the sign I still quote when I do my own washing every week: fluff and fold. “What does that mean?” Kirby asks Kevin. Kevin doesn’t know what it means, so let me tell you. It means make a cloud of dust here, not at home, and save yourself the ironing.
Love Theme From St Elmo’s Fire
Written by David Foster
From the 1985 album St. Elmo’s Fire (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
By D. Gordon E. Robertson - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9472973.
As a disabled person, I really approve of this!