The Robert Downey Jr. Film Guide: Back to School (1986)

In an attempt to help his miserable son, a relatively uneducated businessman buys his way into college.

Low. He was not really a star at this point.

Derek Lutz, the weirdo roommate of Rodney Dangerfield’s son.

Young, oddly dressed (even by ‘80s standards), occasionally has blue hair.

Decent entirely comedic performance. It is what it is.

Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.

Rodney Dangerfield, Sally Kellerman, Ned Beatty, Keith Gordon

Alan Metter’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Rodney Dangerfield in Natural Born Killers. Keith Gordon’s The Singing Detective.

Rodney Dangerfield was a true original. Extremely kind. Wickedly funny. Forget the costumes - I had more gelatin in my hair than you’d use for 100 bowls of Jell-O! You could literally bounce a tennis ball off my hair. It was crispy—it turned into, like, they were like bamboo horns. It was the best. ... That was fun. My hair. I was such a nerd, I thought the higher my hair, the cooler I was ... I was doing Back to School and Saturday Night Live at the same time. So I’d fly back to Los Angeles for a couple of days during the week to shoot the movie and then fly back and, “Live from New York, it’s a tired young man!”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dangerfield and Kellerman discuss The Great Gatsby in this movie, and Thornton Mellon shares common threads with Gatsby (nouveau riche man trying to use money to acquire something that can’t be purchased).

Released in theaters 13 June 1986. On DVD in Region 1, 2 and 4. Available on Blu-ray.

Argentina: De Vuelta al Colegio (Return to School)
Brazil: De Volta às Aulas (Back to School)
Denmark: Med Næsen i Bøgerne (With His Nose in the Books
France: A Fond la Fac (Back to College)
Germany: Mach’s Nochmal, Dad (Make It Again, Dad)
Israel: Back to Youth (English translation)
Italy: A Scuola con Papà (To School with Dad)
Poland: Powrót do Szkoly (Back to School)
Spain: Regreso a la Escuela (Back to School)

88% Fresh | 24 Reviews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: The most interesting thing about Back to School, which is otherwise a pleasant but routine comedy, is the puzzle of Rodney Dangerfield. Here is a man who reminds us of some of the great comedians of the early days of the talkies.

Kim Newman, Empire Magazine: Unlike many other star comedians, Dangerfield isn’t afraid to let anyone else be funny.

1. His hair.
2. Rodney Dangerfield does the Triple Lindy.

It’s an amusing movie to check out on an idle afternoon, but if it doesn’t sound like your thing, it’s not worth seeing just for Downey.

You might also like Weird Science (1985), Johnny Be Good (1987), hanging out at the Friar’s Club