The Case for Clifford: a Cult Legend Turns 30
This year sees several important films celebrating their 30th anniversary. Pulp Fiction, Chunking Express, Hoop Dreams and many more. It can be a difficult task to look back on a film and try to find its place in the current landscape while also trying to understand its importance and reception all those years ago. We can’t understand a film's lasting impact until time has gone on, and the duty and responsibility of film lovers around the world is to help preserve the memories of films that are at risk of being pushed to the side in favor of the “big ones''.
A film that is never in danger of being forgotten, one that has clawed its way into the minds and hearts of film lovers everywhere, of course, is Clifford. Clifford will never be forgotten, because once you have seen it, for better or worse, it's in you.
Clifford is easy to explain to the uninitiated but impossible to appreciate without experiencing. Martin Short plays a 10 year old boy that causes trouble for his uncle when he doesn’t get what he wants. Easy. Watching Clifford is something else entirely, as it requires every bit of your ability to suspend disbelief and (depending on the viewer) to tolerate annoyance. Hard.
The Cast
Martin Short was 37 when he played Clifford, and had made a name for himself in both the Canadian and American comedy landscapes. Singing, dancing and slapping himself into the highly respected position of being every funny person's favorite funny person. He had helped lead films before, playing his 0 to 60 style to perfection in Three Amigos and Innerspace. His other lead or co-lead roles are cult film royalty, with Clifford being the crown jewel.
Playing the straight uncle to Short’s psychotic nephew is Charles Grodin, another actor that doesn’t often make lists of “funniest actors of all time” but turned in incredibly funny, understated performances his entire career. It was Grodin that helped make Robert De Niro the funniest he has ever been in Midnight Run. Uncle Martin is a man of importance, with deadlines, plans and pressures beyond what any kid watching this movie in 1994 could comprehend. For us, Martin represented the unjustified “no” that held us back from achieving our dreams. Even now as an adult I question why Martin couldn’t have taken a short amount of time to bring Clifford to Dinosaur Land as it would have saved time in the long run, but then we might not have the movie. Grodin oscillates between menacing, maniacal and defeated with an energy we didn’t see from him very often, and this film deserves to be seen if for no reason other than to witness his performance.
The wonderful Mary Steenburgen plays Miss Sarah Davis, rounding out the odd love triangle that forms between her, Clifford and Martin. Sarah is engaged to Martin, but is blind to Clifford’s evil side, and becomes one of the adult enablers of his campaign against Martin. Steenburgen was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Melvin (and Howard), and was coming off of an incredibly intense role as the defense attorney opposite Denzel Washington in Philadelphia in 1993. Her comedic chops are perfectly in line with the time and the film, and she anchors the film for us.
Dabney Coleman plays Martin’s boss, Gerald Ellis. He slips back into the role of the sleazy, incompetent man that has somehow gained power that he played to perfection in both Tootsie and 9 to 5. The movie needs a secondary villain to root against, because asking audiences to spend time with the villain is still a pill that we find hard to swallow in 2023, with audiences being so confused by films like Tar or Saltburn, unsure of how to feel when forced to spend time with the devil. *Editor’s note: This is definitely the only time you will see a comparison between Clifford and Tar, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Entering Clifford’s world
As the film opens we are told that kids have dreamed of adventures since the beginning of time, adventures that can be exciting for them, but perilous for adults. We are then treated to a series of illustrations that feature Clifford through the years or children like Clifford, all accompanied by a dinosaur companion. We see knights, westerns, pirate ships and gangsters. None of these scenarios are ones that we would deem safe or appropriate for a child, and yet it is into these worlds that children long to go. If you want a child to go somewhere, just put a line next to it and tell them they can’t cross it.
Clifford sees the lines he is not meant to cross as portals, invitations to interact with the world in ways that match the magnitude of his imagination. To crash an airplane, fake a bombing or stage a fake kidnapping by a motorcycle gang aren’t above his realm of possibility, they are his realm of possibility. Where the movie succeeds most is in never saying no, never stopping to consider that a child couldn’t do something they set their mind and imagination to.
Wayward Boys-Ville
Even amongst Clifford heads, the main story being bookended with Clifford as a priest in the future can be a hard sell. Poking fun at the real life Boys Town and the 1938 film that tells its story, we see Father Clifford on a visit to Wayward Boys-Ville. Furthering the parody we get a joke that riffs on “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!” when young Roger hurls himself out of a window, crushing Father Clifford under his young frame. He may not be heavy, but physics are physics, afterall.
Roger is played by a pint sized Ben Savage, a few years before he would steal our collective hearts as Cory Matthews on Boy Meets World. Roger’s IQ has outgrown his status in life, and he finds himself incredibly frustrated that adults are still allowed to dictate his life simply by saying no. He is frustrated, we learn, to the point of having blown up the gymnasium. Father Clifford tells him the story of his own childhood, in order to explain how smart kids + frustration = large amounts of damage.
The set up and eventual resolution to the main story gives us a slight pause over what we will see. Clifford’s antics don’t make us stand up and cheer, they make our jaws drop and our heads shake and in the end reflect on everything he did - Clifford ends as a morality tale, proof from the future that a bratty child can learn, change and grow. Clifford is, despite everything, a message of hope for humanity.
Look at me like a human boy
The movie follows Clifford as he tries to visit Dinosaur World, a fictional theme park that his architect uncle just so happens to have helped design. Due to unexpected changes at work, Martin is unable to bring his nephew to the amusement park, causing Clifford to spiral into a destructive, revenge fueled plot to upset every area of Martin’s life. It's a movie for kids, you see.
Clifford puts Martin on a train bound for San Francisco the day before his deadline. He destroys his house with a party. He poisons his fiance against him and has him arrested for the supposed planting of a bomb. The rage of an angry child is boundless, so the justice that Clifford doles out is boundless. His closest friend and confidant, a plastic dinosaur named Steffen, is the silent partner and 8-ball for Clifford, a moral guide into which his imagination can repeat his crazed ideas back to him in agreement.
Eventually Martin breaks and enters the same world of possibilities as Clifford, not punishing him with the minimum amount of power that would be required to subdue a child, but utilizing all of his powers and influence to destroy Clifford in a bizarre, death-by-coaster final act that sees all of the wheels fly off the cart, literally and figuratively. It’s a movie for kids, you see.
To make the movie a moral story is, I believe, the exact right thing. The film becomes less about antics and screwball scenarios and more about real things, as Clifford begins his journey of maturity, a journey that begins with personal responsibility. He sees the effects of his actions on Martin, and on his own life. We begin to tangle with the ideas of forgiveness, persistence and putting others ahead of oneself, despite being smarter than them. Heavy stuff, and the film doesn’t dwell on these themes for very long, but it needs them there to give this something beyond “crazed child does crazed stuff.”
Clifford teaches us that while it might take 287 letters of apology, it is worth it to make amends for our actions in the end. Perhaps the journey of forgiveness does just as much for us as people as the forgiveness itself.
No country for old men-boys
Filmed in 1990 but shelved until 1994 due to Orion Pictures going bankrupt, Clifford emerged into a world where kidz ruled and parents drooled. Bart Simpson and Kevin Mcallister had proven that audiences didn’t just want precocious children, but kids that mouthed off and did damage. It was fun! 1994 saw a smatter of kid power movies like Camp Nowhere, Blank Check and Little Big League. People love to talk about Jim Carrey’s 1994, where he starred in Dumb & Dumber, Ace Ventura and The Mask, and rightfully so, but kids had their own version of this with Macaulay Culkin who starred in Richie Rich, Getting Even with Dad and The Pagemaster which all came out in 1994 as well.
In this giant year for immature slapstick comedies Clifford was near dead in the water, pulling in $7.4 million off of a $19 million dollar budget. While the market was overflowing with kid centered slapstick, it had no room for an adult-as-kid torture thriller. Audiences weren’t ready to ask themselves “What if the kid didn’t rule? What if the kid was a psychopath?”
Clifford currently sits with a 13% critic rating and 67% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Rating disparity is certainly nothing new, and is hardly a reason to get ruffled, but I would like to propose that there is more to Clifford than its disturbing hair and make up. If we can accept in ‘Superman’ that a man can fly, we should be able to accept that a 37 year old Canadian can be a 10 year old demon, and that the demon can become a priest.
The only place where a boy like me can be happy
Films like this don’t come along often, probably because studios are interested in making money. Films that blend the absurd with the sentimental, that crash and burn but speak to a few of us in a place inside of us that few films do. To play, to joke, to exist in the absurd is a gift, even if it’s only for an hour or two.
For the longest time I only knew a few people that had heard of Clifford, but recently those numbers are growing. A few online publications have championed the film in the last few years, and film fans are always eager to find the next cult hit, like The Room or Troll II. In an age when we have easier access to more films than ever, a steady stream of the “greatest films ever” can be exhausting, and we occasionally need to break up the highbrow with some lowbrow. Balance in all things then can mean The Human Condition Trilogy gets followed up with Clifford. It’s just plain healthy.
It’s a hard thing to work on a project that fails financially and critically, and it is unfortunately the story of the majority of films that are made. Sometimes though, a film is pulled out of obscurity by the people that love it, polished up and represented to the world. It’s not through trailers or posters, but through love and appreciation, excitement for other people to experience something that seemed lost and hidden. For those of us that are still perplexed by and rooting for Clifford 20 years later, this has become a goal, a love and a mission.
In the words of Clifford, to all of you still working to this end, I leave you with this:
“Mission accomplished, old friend.”
