Where’s Dutch? John Hughes’s second best Thanksgiving movie is nowhere to be found

John Hughes is responsible for the greatest Thanksgiving movie of all time, 1987’s poignant Planes, Trains & Automobiles. This Steve Martin and John Candy-led classic has become a perennial and a movie tons of folks have probably been revisiting this week. However, about four years later, in 1991, John Hughes made another Thanksgiving movie in the same vein, Dutch. Despite being a pretty solid movie with a very recognizable cast, it’s a hard movie to track down nowadays.

Dutch is very much in the vein of Planes, Trains & Automobiles in that it pairs a snooty, white-collar guy with a more down-to-earth, blue-collar kind of guy. The big twist here is that the white-collar guy is a kid, with Ethan Embry (then known as Ethan Randall) playing a prep-school kid who winds up on a long journey home for Thanksgiving with his mom’s new boyfriend, Dutch, played by Ed O’Neill. 

At the time, O’Neill was riding high off the success of TV’s Married…with Children. Known for playing the boorish Al Bundy, this was an attempt to turn O’Neill into a movie star, with him also memorably turning up in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane around this time. For whatever reason, Dutch was a box office dud, only grossing about $4.6 million, although it became a major hit on home video.

Dutch is a fun movie, with O’Neill’s Dutch Dooley very much in the mode of the kinds of characters John Candy used to regularly play for Hughes, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the movie was initially written for him. He’s a funny, blue-collar kind of guy, but he’s also street smart and tough, with the movie climaxing with him punching out the movie’s villain – just like you’d normally see Candy do (such as when he punched the drunk clown in Uncle Buck). 

The chemistry between O’Neill and young Embry is great, and about twelve years later, the two actually re-teamed on a short-lived remake of the classic cop show, Dragnet. Of course, O’Neill would eventually star on ABC’s Modern Family, but despite his fame, Dutch never really got rediscovered. It was briefly on DVD and Blu-ray, but it’s long out-of-print and isn’t streaming (legally) anywhere. It’s not typically talked about as far as John Hughes’s body of work goes, as he only wrote and produced the film, with it being directed by Crocodile Dundee’s Peter Faiman. Yet, it definitely feels like a Hughes movie, complete with heavy use of the band Yello on the soundtrack (who memorably contributed to the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off soundtrack).

So, why is Dutch so hard to find? The movie is likely owned by Disney, with it initially being a 20th Century Fox release, although it’s possible the rights have reverted back to the Hughes Estate. It would be a no-brainer for a company like Arrow, Kino Lorber, or Shout Factory to pick up, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Does anyone remember Dutch? Let us know in the comments!