The secret appeal of Home Alone was never really the booby traps.
What every child wanted was what Macaulay Culkin had: a house to themselves, no rules, unlimited ice cream. This meant that Catherine O’Hara, playing his catastrophically negligent mother, was performing a curious kind of heroism. I was six when I first saw her racing through Chicago airport in full-blown meltdown, and even then I understood she was the film’s emotional engine. If her character’s flustered inadequacy was what drove the plot, it was O’Hara’s wild-eyed panic that gave the film electricity. O’Hara, who has died aged 71 following a brief illness, spent five decades making deeply flawed people not just bearable but beloved.
