American Graffiti

1973 blast of nostalgia

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Four guys spend a night cruising as they contemplate their futures.

I'm not sure why I avoided this for so long. As a blast of nostalgia featuring kids nocturnally cruising these idyllic small town streets looking for smooches, booze, or just a good old time with a backdrop of over forty rock 'n' roll hits, this is almost exactly what I thought it would be and just as good as I thought it would be. I can't remember a movie meeting my exact expectations this closely actually. And I can't remember watching a movie for the first time and almost being fooled into thinking it was a second or third time. Maybe that's why I never got around to seeing the movie. It was already somewhere in my subconscious or something.

You could accuse George Lucas of leaning too heavily on nostalgia in this ode to late childhood. Indeed, he lays it on pretty thickly. But I like the more subtle aspects of this so much. Without explicitly stating anything about regrets, fears, dreams, fears of your dreams, lost loves, lost lusts, and American ideals, the movie says a lot about those and a whole time capsule full of other things. At the same time, Lucas never really specifically addresses the time period immediately following the events in these kids' lives--the assassinations, the racial tensions, the Vietnam war--but it would have been impossible not to think about in 1973 when this movie came out, and it's clearly juxtaposed with all of this technicolor nighttime fun with these smiling kids and their smiling butt cheeks and their colorful hot rods and their hamburgers and Wolfman Jack howling at them like an ornery Jiminy Cricket, the voice of their conscience that they don't have any reason to really listen to because he might just be a recording from some distant land anyway. These kids aren't aware of the rest of this decade or of the rest of their lives or of the fact that Mel's Diner is very likely going to be torn down by the end of the decade and replaced with a generic Burger Chef that doesn't even have a single roller-skating waitress. And it's that lack of awareness, a little slice of dramatic irony in this blast of nostalgia, that almost makes this more of a tragedy than most people would imagine.

Words appearing right before the credits at the end let us know all about these boys' futures, but Lucas should have known that any sort of epilogue was unnecessary. Their future and our past exists without any of that.

I enjoyed the wide-eyed cast here. Young Richard Dreyfuss reminds me so much of Paul Rudd here. Ron Howard and Cindy Williams remind me a lot of Ron Howard and Cindy Williams. Charles Martin Smith had a bit of a Rick Moranis thing going that made his character really appealing, and he got most of the funniest moments. Paul Le Mat (translation: Paul of the Mat) doesn't give a great performance, but he has this great mix of tough guy and tortured soul that makes him seem like he's straight from an S.E. Hinton book. And I'm a sucker for all Three's Company connections, so it was great seeing Suzanne Somers as the haunting gorgeous blonde in the white car whom Paul Rudd pursues for the better part of the night. Oh, and then there's Harrison Ford in a cowboy hat.

You have to pay close attention, but Lucas has some really boss things with his camera in this, too. Some of these shots, if this had the amount of fanboys as the Star Wars movies, would have a chance to be almost as iconic.