American Graffiti
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 …