["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]
-
Cars and music both play big roles in American Graffiti. Mel's drive-in, which was in San Francisco, was demolished not long after the movie was filmed.
This isn't a movie review. It's a review of one guy watching one movie.
I read that people are watching old movies because they're penned in the house by the pandemic, so, on a whim, I decided to get with the program. Clicked on Amazon Prime and American Graffiti popped up. So I watched again a movie that I first saw when I was 16.
It has always been one of my favorite movie memories. Just as an aside, most peoples' favorite movies come from the ones they saw during their formative years. It's a sign of a real movie buff when that's not the case. I have a few older movies on my favorites list, but that's only because of the Dartmouth Film Society, where I saw lots of old classic movies...during, yup, my formative years.
Unlike some old movies that I cherish in memory, this one was just as good from the perspective of late middle age as it was when I was a kid. I thought it was hilarious when I was a teenager—I laughed out loud in the theater when the cop car pops its axle (a scene which was much more subversive and transgressive then)—and now the jokes no longer strike home with nearly the same force. But if anything, the movie is even richer to me now as a period piece, a character study, and a masterpiece of pacing, editing, storyline, casting, and dialogue.
Here's where you stop reading if you don't like spoilers
It's a story of four young men who've graduated from high school and whom life is about to take in separate directions. There's John Milner, the greaser mechanic and hot rodder who plays the tough guy but has a soft side; persecuted but still game and friendly Terry the Toad; and best friends Steve and Curt (Steve dates Curt's sister), who discover they're on opposite sides of their longtime plan to leave their hometown and take their lives higher and farther. In one epic all-nighter, John gradually becomes a tragic figure, a personification of the old Shakespearian line "uneasy is the head that wears a crown," even as he is gradually revealed to be tender-hearted and gallant; and (as the movie's clown figure), luckless, ugly-duckling Terry magically gets everything he ever wanted—great car, beautiful girl—and has the worst night of his life. Steve and Curt start out as opposites—they've worked for months to leave their little California town for college "in the East," but Steve is eager to escape and Curt is having second thoughts. Over the course of the evening, Curt has to confront his desire for something more, something "exciting and dazzling," in form of a fleeting connection with an elusive blonde in a white Thunderbird who he chases for the rest of the evening, and he gets dragged into various crimes and associations that could make remaining in town uncomfortable for him. Meanwhile, it turns out that Steve had probably been gung-ho about escaping because he'd seen his likely future all too clearly: he'd been feeling the tractor-beam pull of marriage and a humdrum small-town life. The appeal of which becomes clear to him when he almost loses it, in the fiery penultimate scene. By morning, the two friends have both accepted their destinies and have switched places—Curt leaves, Steve stays.
And as Curt's plane disappears in the sky (the movie's version of riding off into the sunset), we learn the fate of our four protagonists.
Harrison Ford, who interrupted his chosen career as a carpenter to play John Milner's hot-rod challenger, refused to cut his hair for the part and got drunk on set every night
What I didn't know about the movie is how hard the then-little-known George Lucas had to fight to realize the vision he had for the film. He realized that much of the culture he took for granted in his own teen years had been a candle in the wind, a brief moment between the complacent 1950s and the Kennedy assassination, the "British Invasion," and the counterculture of the tumultuous '60s. He wanted to commemorate it accurately, if also lovingly, and the movie has been widely praised for being a sociological record of what that brief era felt like to live in. His intention was to direct; but the first script he commissioned was cynical and conventional, so he fired the screenwriter he had hired and began to craft the story line himself—the partners he wanted to work with were off toiling on other projects. In the final draft those partners returned, and the trio worked especially hard to rewrite the storyline between Steve and his sweetheart Laurie. It shows. We learn a great deal about those two characters and their relationship through the most economical of means, and as the movie progresses it becomes a romance that's all the more beautiful for being so true to life.
The aging, popsicle-eating disc jockey (Wolfman Jack playing himself) knows he can't live up to his on-air persona, so he stays in the shadows. As with everyone else, Curt has his number.
The film was one of the first to use a series of real pop songs in place of a soundtrack—a commonplace technique since then—and clearing the rights to the many songs was a significant impediment to bringing the project to life. One holdout was Elvis Presley, so there are no Elvis songs in American Graffiti. Matching songs to scenes is also believed to have been an important part of the way George Lucas went about organizing his material.
It was shot in a low-key, unassuming, vaguely verité style on 35mm film. Like Asphalt Jungle, another favorite of mine, most of the action takes place at night, with the exception of the final scene.
Probably the most moving scene in what was designed as a comedy is the final pane, the epilogue as it were, that shows the fate of each of the four friends. Diverge their lives did...one died in Viet Nam while another (it's implied) dodged the draft in Canada, for instance. (I assumed when I was 16 that Curt was the fictional alter-ego of the writer of the movie. Not true, exactly. But in the context of the fictional world of the movie I'm going to keep thinking so.) In any event, knowing in advance the contents of that last pane makes the brief junkyard scene far more poignant—the king foreshadowing his own downfall—and lends retrospective nobility to the hapless Toad.
What's past was prologue
American Graffiti is that rara avis in Hollywood, a work of artistic integrity and authorial vision, and it's very famous now. Ironically, given that it was rejected by no less than four big studios and criticized by studio bosses as a non-starter because it didn't have any stars, many of its then-unknown actors went on to become big names in movies and on television. Even the woman in the Thunderbird, seen only in glimpses, obliquely, went on to star in a sitcom. Director Lucas, who arguably couldn't have made Star Wars if it weren't for the success of American Graffiti, is now one of the most famous and richest filmmakers in history. And the movie itself earned the distinction of having the largest return for the smallest investment of any American film ever: as a low-budget first effort by an unknown, all-in, including its promotion budget, it cost about one and a quarter million dollars to make, and it has earned hundreds of millions worldwide. There have been bigger blockbusters, but none were ever made on such a shoestring. The list of the honors it's been given is as long as your arm—it's included in numerous top-100 lists. It lost out for Best Picture in 1973 to The Sting, a good film on the level of The Grifters and Blood Simple, but which of the two would you call the better movie now?
I'm sure most of you have seen it. But it's a nice movie to rewatch. Seeing it again reconnected me not only to a vanished America I never knew firsthand, not only to my teen self, but to a style of movie-making I miss. A lovely film to revisit.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Like TOP?
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
David Hamilton: "Ironically The Sting was one of the first movies I saw growing up. I still haven’t seen American Graffiti. That’ll be rectified this weekend."
Duncan: "What a great review. Makes me want to watch it again after all these years."
fred fowler: "What a pleasant surprise to see your comments today regarding American Graffiti. It remains one of my favorite movies and was one of those rare but wonderful films that when viewed for the first time with neither knowledge or expectation, one is completely smitten. Having just turned 74 I very much lived many of the automotive and cultural aspects of the movie. Those also being my formative years, many of those same elements remain in essence part of what I value and am entertained by. I have also felt the movie in many ways was a metaphor for the country with the epic all-nighter being the fleeting innocence and rebellious good time of the '50s all too harshly supplanted forever by the dawn of the of the '60s. I agree it has more than aged well and is a touchstone I periodically revisit."
Bruno Gonzalez: "I saw American Graffiti for the first time in the summer of 1976 during my first visit to the U.S.from France (a cross-country Greyhound adventure). The cinema was a small room in an abandoned building in Cannery Row, Monterey; no seats, you had to sit on cushions right on the concrete floor and try to keep for a while some kind of not-too-back-breaking position. I loved the movie, I was 19 and a hot rod enthusiast.
"The abandoned building where the cinema was located was in fact part of the Hovden Cannery, the site of what became eight years later the world-class Monterey Aquarium; that part of the old cannery still exists, just near the entrance to the Aquarium. I had been attracted to Monterey and Cannery Row in the first place because of my interest for John Steinbeck. I had already read all his novels and wanted to experience the places he rendered so vividly in some of his best writings. The yellow Deuce coupe, the old cannery on the waterfront, everything came together—what a cultural shock.
"Serendipitously, many years later, my son Paul moved to Monterey to do his PhD in biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, just next door to the Aquarium.... Every time I visited him there, I passed by this building forever culturally linked to so many things that have mattered a lot to me, and still do. Like Curt, I now live in Canada."
David Comdico: "Great film. It was shot in chronological order to which, I think, Ron Howard responded along the lines of: 'George we're actors, we know how to act to a script.' But Lucas wanted the actors to look more tired as the film ran on. It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise. The use of widescreen along with the cinema verité style create a very unique look that still feels current.
"Another great movie about California/American car culture is Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, starring James Taylor."
Mike replies: Re 'It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise,' couldn't agree more. I would have loved it if he'd gone on to a string of similarly excellent naturalistic movies about real people and real life in the real world. I never would have begrudged him Star Wars, but he got diverted into it (and other popular fantasy) for the rest of his life. And there goes that. You know what they say: Oh well.
Peter: "Although it came out after my first set of 'formative years,' one of my favorites is Animal House, mostly because I spent four malformed years as a member of a college fraternity that was very much like the one in the movie. To this day, I can still put real names to all of the main characters in the movie."
Russell Scheid: "I grew up in Walnut Creek, 75 miles away from Modesto. 'Cruising the Main' was a such a highlight of my high school years. From flirting with the opposite sex at red lights between car windows to dragging between stop lights, the California car culture was unlike any other. Every time I watch American Graffiti I'm transported back to those glory years where instead of Bloods vs. Crips, it was Mustangs vs. Camaros."
