Planes, Trains & Automobiles was written and directed by the great John Hughes and originally released back on November 25, 1987. The film is set two days before Thanksgiving, when marketing consultant "Neal Page" (played by Steve Martin) races to catch a plane home to Chicago, only to find that his flight has been delayed. Hours later, he boards the plane and ends up next to obnoxious shower curtain ring salesman, "Del Griffith" (played by John Candy). When the flight is detoured to Wichita, the mismatched pair are forced to find their own way to Chicago-by any means necessary. Hilarity ensues.

Here is the original trailer for P,T & A which is well-worth watching:

Planes, Trains & Automobiles TRAILER - The funniest videos are a click away

I started to write some of my thoughts on this great film, when I came across an article by Eric D. Snider on Film.com which I really thought did a fantastic job of capturing some of the feelings I was trying to express. I thought I would just share with you excerpts from Snider's fantastic article below:

Eric's Time Capsule: Planes, Trains and Automobiles
John Hughes left the teen angst back in the 'burbs to make this timeless farce with Steve Martin and John Candy.

John Hughes' association with teen movies is so entrenched that modern critics often feel compelled to name-check him, usually with great reverence, when reviewing anything set in a high school. It's easy to forget that he only wrote and directed four such films -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- and that most of his other two-dozen-plus screenplays have been about families and kids: Home Alone, National Lampoon's Vacation, Mr. Mom, etc.

Rarer still in the Hughes canon are films that are entirely about adults. Of the eight films he has directed himself, only two fall under that category: She's Having a Baby and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the latter of which has become a classic that almost surpasses any of the teen comedies Hughes made.

PT&A was released the day before Thanksgiving in 1987, Hughes' fifth film as a director and the first one after that string of teen-centric hits. He filled it with people he was comfortable with, including Ferris Bueller cast members Edie McClurg, Ben Stein, and Lyman Ward (Ferris' dad). There's a cameo from Kevin Bacon, who had just starred in Hughes' She's Having a Baby, which was released 10 weeks after PT&A and can actually be heard playing in the background early in the film.

Star John Candy had appeared in Vacation, which Hughes wrote, and though co-star Steve Martin and Hughes had not worked together before, they certainly knew each other in Hollywood comedy circles. Candy and Martin were both very popular. The film was a departure from Hughes' established genre, but it wasn't exactly a risky proposition.

That said, it may be surprising how positive the reviews were. Martin and Candy were stars, but they weren't exactly known for highbrow, critic-pleasing comedies. Yet most critics adored the film, and audiences rewarded it with a modestly successful box office take. Its $49 million gross would be about $88 million at today's ticket prices and it has flourished on TV and video. (Hughes helped its TV longevity by shooting an alternate, profanity-free version of the famous F-word-laden car-rental-agency scene for broadcast networks to use in place of the theatrical one.) *see below for this scene

The film is a combination of two major genres, the road-trip movie and the odd-couple movie, as well as the sub-genre I like to call the one-thing-after-another disaster comedy (think Meet the Parents). Uptight Neal Page (Martin) and annoyingly gregarious Del Griffith (Candy) are stranded businessmen trying to get from New York to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving, forced by circumstances to pool their resources and become traveling companions. Neal and Del's opposite personalities create plenty of comic potential (casting Martin and Candy as heightened versions of themselves seals the deal), and there's a lot of the vehicular mayhem and destruction typical of the road-trip genre. Some of these gags are more inspired than others -- Hughes' sense of humor runs toward the conventional -- but Candy and Martin sell them like true pros.

Take the bed scene, for example. It is customary in all comedies that if two heterosexual men are required to share a bed, they will wake up in a compromised position, react initially as if nothing is wrong, do a double-take, then leap out of the bed in horror. (This is so well established that it's only in comedies that two straight men ever have to share a bed. If it happened in a drama, we'd be expecting hilarity when they woke up, and the film's mood would be ruined.) Hughes employs this chestnut, which was already old in 1987, but look at how well Martin and Candy play it. The dialogue itself is classic:

MARTIN: Why did you kiss my ear?
CANDY: Why are you holding my hand?
MARTIN: Where's your other hand?
CANDY: Between two pillows.
MARTIN: THOSE AREN'T PILLOWS!

Here is that scene below: