Retrospective Film Review

The Addams Family (1991) • 30 Years Later

Con artists plan to fleece an eccentric family using an accomplice who claims to be their long-lost uncle.

It was 1938 when Charles Addams started drawing for The New Yorker the cartoons that have made him legendary, depicting the utter inversion of the Norman Rockwellesque happy all-American family. His characters certainly had many of the same attributes (notably a devotion to the family itself), but they resembled horror-movie figures and delighted in gloom and misery, for themselves and for others. One of his best drawings simply depicts a couple exchanging what for them count as sweet nothings: “Unhappy, darling?” — “Oh yes, yes!”

That gag actually makes it into Barry Sonnenfeld’s film, though Addams’s work generally was a little darker than the movie and the TV renditions of the family that had preceded it: a 1964 series (debuting a week before the conceptually similar The Munsters) and several other small-screen appearances during the 1970s.