"Animal House" is cinematically sloppy—I've now seen the film twice and I still can't separate some of the people. There always seem to be two characters who look much alike to represent a single type. It's full of supposedly comic scenes that have no adequate punch lines to end them, and some of the cross-cutting seems to have been done during a blackout. Yet the movie's fondness for sloth, mess, vulgarity, non-conformism (circa 1962, of course), as demonstrated by the members of an epically disorganized college fraternity, is frequently very, very funny.

The targets of its humor (gung-ho fraternities, neatness, Nixon, chastity, sobriety, Vietnam, patriotism, ceramics) are not exactly sacred at this point, but the gusto of the movie is undeniably appealing. So too are the performers….

The success of "Animal House" … is rather easier understood after the fact than before. Among other things, "Animal House" calls attention...