American Graffiti (1973)

American Graffiti is an American romantic film drama first released in 1973, directed by George Lucas.  The film stars Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith and Cindy Williams.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Modesto, California, 1962.  After a party to celebrate the end of term, a group of high school graduates go cruising about town, and end up having a far more eventful night than they planned.  Steve Bolander and Curt Henderson are set to leave town the following day to start their college education, although both have reservations about leaving.  Steve awkwardly tells his girlfriend Laurie that it will be okay for her to date other men whilst he is away, which is not something the romantically inclined teenager wanted to hear.  Curt’s romantic streak is set alight when he glimpses a vision of supreme loveliness in a white T-Bird.  Convinced that the woman mouthed the words I love you to him before she drove off, Curt immediately rushes off to look for her, but ends up with a gang of roughneck bikers.  Terry Fields, a category-A nerd whose one ambition is to be as cool as his friends, is over the moon when Steve lends him his Chevy Impala.  Emboldened by this new status symbol, Terry drives off, hoping to pick up a new lady friend – which he promptly does.   Debbie somehow finds the geeky Terry irresistible and is more than willing to give him a good time.  John Milner, the coolest member of the gang, and the owner of the fastest car in the valley, somehow ends up being saddled with a stroppy fourteen-year-old named Carol.  John would rather spend the evening with a putrefying dead squid but when the girl threatens to indict him for attempted rape he has no choice but to chauffeur her around town.  Meanwhile, Steve and Laurie’s relationship has well and truly hit the rocks.  As Laurie drives off in her car after a final bust up, Steve is left contemplating his future...

George Lucas may be best remembered for his sci-fi spectacular Star Wars, the film that totally redefined cinema in the late ’70s as well as launching the most successful movie franchise in history, but his best work preceded this.  Following his chilling and highly innovative sci-fi drama THX 1138 (1971), Lucas took us on a different journey, not into the far reaches of outer space, but back to the early 1960s, to a small American town identical to the one in which he grew up.  That film, American Graffiti, would be Lucas’s first great success, the definitive teen movie which is now widely acknowledged as the director’s one truly great film.

It is almost unbelievable that a film which would become a box office phenomenon and a cult classic was virtually a non-starter.  All but one of the major studios that Lucas approached (20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount) turned the proposition down, failing to see any mileage in a film about a group of highschool kids enjoying themselves to the strains of Buddy Holly and The Beach Boys.  With the support of his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas finally sold the idea to Universal, but the budget he was given was derisory, barely a million dollars.  Yet this modest budget is what made the film so effective and groundbreaking.  The unpolished performances, jagged editing and crude cinéma vérité style camera work are what make the film, giving it its distinctive realism and authenticity.

American Graffiti was cheaply made, cheaply marketed, but it was an outstanding success.  The box office receipts for its first two releases in the United States exceeded 100 million dollars. Although less successful in Europe, the film was popular in France, where it was acclaimed as a great auteur piece.  To date, American Graffiti has grossed in excess of 200 million dollars, making it one of the most profitable films of all time.  It was the success of this film that bankrolled Lucas’s next film, Star Wars, and enabled the young director to create the special effects team which would revolutionise the sci-fi fantasy genre.  If it had not been for this quaint film about cruising teenagers, the world may never have got to hear about Darth Vader, C-3PO and Princess Leia.  

In addition to Star Wars, American Graffiti left some other sizeable impact craters on the world of film and television.  It effectively launched the careers of some now highly regarded individuals, including Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford.  It also engendered a whole swathe of similarly themed television sitcoms in the 1970s, including the all-time classic Happy Days (with Ron Howard reprising his loveable college kid role) and its successful spin-off Laverne & Shirley (which brought back the wonderful Cindy Williams).

Perhaps the greatest legacy of American Graffiti is the whole teen movie genre, films that provide a valuable record of the evolution of youth culture over the past decades.  Sadly, no film in this generally ill-regarded genre has come close to matching the brillliance of American Graffiti.  In a similar vein to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), the film is a loosely structured nostalgia piece consisting of vignettes set to well-known songs of the period.  Endearing and funny, the film evokes an era that now exists only in the memories of those who experienced the thrill of adolescence in the early 1960s, a time of innocence, optimism and great music – and even better haircuts.

There is a warmth and humanity to this film, qualities that are lacking in George Lucas’s subsequent work.  In contrast to the bland plastic heroes and villains of Star Wars and its various money-spinning offshoots, here we have real people, convincingly portrayed, living real lives in a real town.  Once you have got over the orgasmic spectacle of Star Wars, you quickly realise that there is very little substance beneath the gloss, bravado and torrent of special effects. American Graffiti, by contrast, offers a much richer experience.  This is a film you will always want to return to and which just gets better with every repeated viewing.  So, just what did happen to George Lucas after he made this timeless masterpiece?  My theory is that he was cloned and replaced by aliens.

© James Travers 2010

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