Monthly Archives: May 2018

  • American Graffiti

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Lucas (1973)

    George Lucas wrote this, his second feature, with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck.  One of the top-grossing American films of 1973, American Graffiti is set eleven years earlier and squeezes the summer-I-grew-to-be-a-man story into the space of a few hours.  Set in Lucas’s home town of Modesto, California, the film centres on four friends and takes place on the night before two of them, recent high-school graduates, are due to set off into a different world.  The quartet are familiar enough types:  clean-cut, quietly intelligent Steve (Ronny Howard[1]); goofy, involuntary court jester Terry (Charlie Martin Smith), nicknamed ‘Toad’; macho but amusingly thwarted John (Paul Le Mat), the local drag-racing king; and introspective Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) – the central consciousness of the story and perhaps George Lucas’s alter ego.  Curt and Steve are the pair scheduled to start college next day on the other side of the country.

    American Graffiti is decidedly male nostalgia (and almost comically premature nostalgia:  its director wasn’t yet thirty when he made it) – all the women’s roles are underwritten.  In spite of this and good as the four main actors are (Dreyfuss particularly), it’s the female performances that are memorable – especially Cindy Williams, as Steve’s devoted girlfriend Laurie, a high-school cheerleader with a powerfully miserable side to her personality.  Mackenzie Phillips has spiky charm as Carol, the argumentative adolescent who ends up spending the evening in John’s car (and is as unhappy as he is with the arrangement).  Candy Clark – as the cartoon kook Debbie, Toad’s similarly surprising partner – is amusing and occasionally affecting.

    The picture’s strapline was ‘Where were you in ’62?’ and the soundtrack is liberally sprinkled with pop hits of the late fifties and early sixties.  Lucas’s evocation of the recent past was much admired – although it’s established very obviously in the opening shots of Mel’s Drive-In diner, accompanied by ‘Rock Around the Clock’.  (That song is slightly anachronistic, of course, but a good indicator of the way that Lucas exploits folk memory.)   The film is easily entertaining with plenty of incident (some of it unoriginal) and appealing performances all round, including a key cameo from the disc jockey Wolfman Jack, as himself.  The shining, gliding cars contribute to the narrative’s seductive rhythm.  A where-are-they-now postscript –  John was killed by a drunk driver in 1964, Terry went missing in action in Vietnam the following year, Steve is an insurance agent still living in Modesto, Curt is a writer based in Canada – amounts to a last-minute attempt to confer on American Graffiti a depth it doesn’t have.

    [1970s]

    [1] Afternote:  As Ron Howard was known at the time …

  • The Threepenny Opera

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die 3-groschen-oper

    G W Pabst (1931)

    The film programmer Margaret Deriaz gave an excellent introduction to this BFI screening of The Threepenny Opera.  She was informative about the making of G W Pabst’s film and the legal disputes with the original authors that it generated.  She very clearly placed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s theatre musical – a succès fou when first staged in Berlin in 1928 – in its cultural and political context.  The version that BFI showed included a prologue, inserted in an East German reissue of the late 1940s, in which two of the film’s main actors, Ernst Buch and Fritz Rasp, reflect on its harmony with Communist thinking.  At the time of its original release, however, plenty of Marxists deplored what they considered a blatantly capitalist undertaking and were hardly better disposed to the film than the Nazis, who banned it in 1933.

    The Threepenny Opera is an essential artefact of the Weimar Republic and the visual style of Pabst’s film confirms the place and time in which it was made.  (The cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner’s other credits in the 1920s and early 1930s include Nosferatu, M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.)  The surprising, sometimes discomfiting camera movement, long dark shadows and twisty stairways are so characteristic of contemporary German expressionist cinema that the nineteenth-century London setting of the story – the days leading up to Victoria’s coronation – always seems weirdly artificial.   (Brecht and Weill’s inspiration was The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 1728 stage entertainment, with its cast of London lowlifes and their social ‘betters’.  Gay’s aristocratic targets became bourgeois ones in The Threepenny Opera.)  The inter-war Germanic substrate of the film is sealed by one of its retrospective qualities.  In the closing stages, as crowds of have-nots trudge through the streets, they irresistibly bring to mind other, real ghetto faces of the period.

    The musical highlights come courtesy of Ernst Buch and Lotte Lenya.   The strong-faced Buch, in the role of the street singer, gets things off to a splendid start with his rendition of The Threepenny Opera‘s most famous number, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’ (one of those songs whose melody means it could go on for ever, whose ending seems almost comically arbitrary).   As the prostitute Jenny, Lenya, with her natural eccentricity and flair, gives the film a shot in the arm with her delivery of ‘Seeräuberjenny’.   It’s a positive turning point:  from here on, the plot gathers pace.   The wedding of Mackie Messer and Polly Peachum, along with the events surrounding it, has been slower, harder going.   As the dandified crime boss Mackie (Mack the Knife), Rudolf Forster is good whenever he gives the camera a menacing level stare but neither he nor Fritz Rasp (Peachum) is exciting to watch.  Carola Neher as Polly has the presence of a fine actress.  Margaret Deriaz gave forewarning that Reinhold Schünzel, as the police chief Tiger-Brown, plays in an exuberant musical-comedy style.   In contrast, the white horse on which Tiger-Brown appears at one point and that wanders off after he’s dismounted, is a nicely deadpan performer.  Vladimir Sokoloff, excellent as Mackie’s duped jailer, is one of several cast members who also appeared in the French-language version of the film that Pabst made at the same time as this German one.

    23 May 2018

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