Review: American Graffiti (1973)

The studio didn’t like the title, and I never really knew what to make of it myself. I guess American Graffiti suggests youth culture and teenage rebellion, but no teenager sprays graffiti on a brick wall in the movie, and the characters are more angsty than rebellious. This is not Rebel without a Cause or West Side Story.

Then—hear me out—I recently watched the first season of HBO’s TV series Rome (2005), the opening title sequence for which depicts the rough, bawdy graffiti ancient Romans painted on their city walls, like you might see in pictures of Pompeii. So when I revisited American Graffiti this August, to commemorate its 50th anniversary, it finally clicked for me. We’ve all seen the scratched or penned phrase, “So-and-so was here,” on a desk, or a wall, or a bathroom stall. For some reason, we humans are drawn to illicitly scribble on public surfaces in order to testify to our presence in a moment in time for unknown future viewers.

That’s kind of what George Lucas is doing with American Graffiti. I now understand why Lucas was so adamant that that be the title of the film. For American Graffiti is, in part, an attempt to document a way of life that Lucas himself lived through and that, even by 1973, had long passed away. 

American Graffiti is more than just a nostalgia trip, however. Yes, it evokes an assumedly more innocent America in ’62, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, and the expansion of the Vietnam War, and a couple years before the Beatles and the British Invasion changed rock music, and before the full force of the counterculture changed everything else. At the same time, Lucas is not simply interested in broadly held feelings about or clichés of a past decade (like so many evocations today of the 50s, or 80s, or really any prior decade).

Lucas captures the minutiae of the period as well as its distinctive features. In the 1998 documentary, The Making of American Graffiti, Lucas says that, from an anthropological point of view, the film is about how the technology of the automobile facilitates a very specific kind of mating ritual. This is a world of cars: boys driving cars to find girls and girls driving cars to find boys. Of young people driving around, cruising the small city’s main strip, because there isn’t much else to do, and you don’t know what else to do on this night or with the rest of your life after high school. Of young lives lived, all accompanied by the rock-and-roll music played by favourite disc jockeys. There’s a drag race, but no game of chicken, which Lucas, who himself loved and raced cars as a teenager, says no one really did.

American Graffiti is George Lucas’s early masterpiece. It’s a work that is easily digestible as a nostalgia piece, but that operates on a far deeper and more complex level than that descriptor implies. This isn’t just a slice of early 60s Americana, and this isn’t just the lead up to 1977’s Star Wars. At the same time, American Graffiti reinforces many aspects of what is commonly said about Lucas, while also revealing sides that are too often forgotten or unrecognized.

For example, sunsets figure prominently in Lucas’s films. We all know the binary sunset that Luke Skywalker wistfully watches in A New Hope (which I analyzed in my retrospective review from 2019). In a less famous but still masterful scene at the end of THX-1138, Bach’s St Matthew Passion plays while Robert Duvall’s numbered citizen ascends a tunnel to the earth’s surface and emerges as a silhouette against a large reddish orange sun. Both scenes are striking for their elegant combinations of sound and image to convey emotion, but to different effects. The emotion in Star Wars is universal: longing for something more. THX-1138, Lucas’s avant garde dystopia, is more ambiguous. Is this true deliverance or condemnation to death on the surface? 

In American Graffiti, after the cool radio opening for the film—which plays today more like what we expect from Tarantino rather than Lucas—we get “Rock Around the Clock” over an image of Mel’s Drive-In burger joint, with the pink clouds of a luscious sunset in the background. The opening credits play over what appears to be a static image of the drive-in, frozen while the song’s beats and lyrics about hours on the clock jump along. The song, as recorded by Bill Hayley & His Comets, is famous as the single often considered to be the herald of the arrival of rock and roll. In the world of the film, in the summer of 1962, the song plays like a last gasp against the declining sun. The opening evokes the sense of exhilaration at the start of a big night out, while pointing to the inevitable fatigue and end of every event and era. Such nuances enrich what appears to be a pretty straightforward teen story about the last day of summer vacation, and two guys deciding whether or not to leave their hometown.

The narrative plays like a documentary following four main male characters on the last night of summer, but it embodies a core concern in Lucas’s works. In the terms of Joseph Campbell, whom Lucas studied, each of Lucas’s first three movies features the protagonist having to decide whether to cross the threshold and enter the wider world of adventure. THX-1138 will eventually escape his dystopian city shell for the supposedly uninhabitable outer world. Luke Skywalker has to decide to leave his desert farm to go with Obi-Wan Kenobi to rescue the princess (a threshold crossing that has spoken powerfully to my own life, as I’ve written before). In American Graffiti, Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) must decide whether to leave their small California city in the Central Valley—modelled after Lucas’s hometown of Modesto—for college “back East.” On the eve of their departure, Curt has doubts. Their friends, Terry “the Toad,” a well-meaning nerd (played by Charles Martin Smith), and John (Paul Le Mat), a hotrod enthusiast in Junior College, meet up with them, although circumstances lead all four to largely follow their own path over the course of the long night. Cindy Williams plays Laurie, the younger girlfriend of Steve, who doesn’t want him to leave town and her. Candy Clark plays Debbie, a popular blonde who pairs up with Terry, and Mackenzie Phillips plays Carol, a younger teen who accidentally gets dumped on John for the night. There are other memorable characters, such as Harrison Ford’s cowboy hat-donning racer from out of town, who's out to beat John, and a gang of greasers—the Pharaohs—that Curt gets involved with. And of course, there’s the legendary “Wolfman” Jack, a radio personality and disc jockey whom all the young people listen to and are obsessed with, and whom Curt will eventually meet in a special encounter. Ford is as close as the movie gets to a villain, and Wolfman is the mysterious wizard who can bestow wisdom.

Ron Howard’s Steve was the big man in high school, class president, popular, well-liked and known by all in town. He’s also a bit selfish and can sometimes be a jerk, such as when he tells Laurie they should agree to see other people while he is away—even though she’s still the one, he assures her. Other times, Ron Howard seems to be channeling Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, with that character’s deep desire to escape his hometown but ultimate loyalty to those around him. The more sensitive and intelligent Curt is overthinking whether he should leave. It’s Dreyfuss’s breakout role, with all his well-known physical and vocal mannerisms on display. Dreyfuss’s nuanced performance is the most important amongst a strong cast.

After the opening credits, we see Charles Martin Smith’s Terry drive his Vespa up beside Ron Howard in his big car in a wide shot that captures the figures without much movement. Terry, fumbling with the controls as he tries to park, lurches his Vespa into a trash bin, and we know this movie moves to the rhythms of real life. The shot apparently captured a mistake Smith never intended to perform, but Lucas used it anyway, as he did with many scenes in the movie. Show me a wooden line in this script, or rather, in the deliveries. In fact, many scenes are largely improvised based on the screenplay, Lucas often favouring the cut that the actors thought didn’t quite work out. 

As a director, Lucas has been better but never more authentic and real and raw than in American Graffiti, in spite of the seemingly static first shot. Coppolla came on to produce the film to help the production with his name, but he also pushed George to keep with the screenplay (Lucas never wanted to write again after THX-1138) and to embrace the rough and tumble filmmaking that would be required with their small budget. 

The atmosphere of American Graffiti is the combination of the excellent cinematography and sound design. Lucas and visual consultant Haskell Wexler, a key figure of the emerging New Hollywood, attempt to capture the appearance of environmental lighting at night. Most of the additional lighting was placed in such a way as to appear to be the street lights. or shop windows, etc.. Likewise, Lucas mounted cameras on cars: two often filmed simultaneously to capture cars driving in parallel to each other, while the occupants chat. A few shots are handheld, such as the key resolution scene after the climactic crash. There are, of course, many of Lucas’s favoured medium-wide and wide shots. Lucas’s then-wife, Marcia Lucas, also co-edited the film, showing that her contributions to George’s works of the 1970s deserve a second look.

On the sound front, Lucas brought in his old college associate, Walter Murch, to create the “sound montages” for the few scenes that do not feature pop music. Murch also helped rerecord all the pop songs, to give them the sound of being played in the real world, out of car radios or from shops and restaurants, etc. This was a new technique at the time. Lucas wrote the screenplay with a different record in mind for each scene (often directly stated in the screenplay). Ron Howard has described Lucas telling him that the movie is a musical, but without characters singing. Like in Star Wars, the music here is central to Lucas’s vision and narrative. American Graffiti played a major role in shaping the modern day convention of matching pop music to scenes in movies. The sound design, which blends diegetic music with more lyrical and unrealistic moments of music, is a genuine feat and one whose influence on the medium is vastly underappreciated.

The complexity extends to the themes and narration of American Graffiti. Lucas smartly embeds nostalgia into the narrative itself. The movie doesn’t only look back; Lucas presents his characters as looking back at the end of the summer after graduation. The freshman hop, which is the big dance before the new school year that Steve and Laurie and Curt go to, allows Lucas to align the characters’ nostalgia for their high school days with the audience’s, many of whom in 1973 could remember their younger days in this same period. 

There is also a deeper, more mythic or universal, level to American Graffiti, which is not surprising given Lucas’s affinity for archetypes and myth. Lucas wants this very specific document about 1962 to speak to recurrent themes in life and art. For instance, Curt is obsessed with tracking down a girl he sees driving in a white Ford Thunderbird. This evocative, illusive figure recalls the memory of the girl with the white parasol recounted by Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) in Citizen Kane, a symbol of not only the perfect dream girl but also the untaken path—what could have been. The girl you didn’t pursue back in high school. We also wonder who Lucas would have been had he stayed on the path of being a car racer, instead of changing paths after a big crash that nearly killed him. Or if he had stayed on the path of more realistic films like this and not done Star Wars.

This time around I also noticed the poignancy of Paul Le Mat’s car guy and racer, John, who is never remembered as often as the other actors who achieved great fame in their later careers. In real life, Howard and Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford and Cindy Williams went on to much bigger things. Who remembers Paul Le Mat? At one point, John laments that rock and roll has “gone downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” and that in the good ol’ days he used to need a whole tank of gas to drive the main strip of the city: “It used to really be something.” The world has grown more bland and smaller, in his view, while he jokingly ribs Dreyfuss for getting out of the town to college. Clearly, John’s views about everything being in decline shield fears that life and the world has passed him by. Unlike Curt, who has so much ahead of him, and despite Terry’s claims that John is the best and always will be at the end, John has no future apart from waiting to turn into Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

The final few scenes of the film are brilliant and touching and sad. I’m talking about the car crash at dawn and the rough camera work as Steve and Laurie reunite, while Terry (with elation) and John (with a big sigh) decide to “take them all.” I’m also talking about Curt getting the phone call from the dream girl he will never meet, and the airplane taking off with four titles telling the audience what will become of these four young men. That moment makes the film, and is one of the greatest final title cards in any movie. The end credits contain one of the greatest needle drops, juxtaposing the Beach Boys’ surfer rock anthem “All Summer Long” against the just-revealed fates of the four main male characters: premature death; Vietnam; lives of modest achievement in business and art. The crashing wave of the rest of life and the changing of America. 

At 50, American Graffiti is worth remembering and revisiting, never more urgently than in late August, at summer’s end. The film is not just a testament to George Lucas’s importance to cinema beyond Star Wars. Here is a movie that is a great bookend for summer vacation as well as a distinct subculture of American life.

10 out of 10

American Graffiti (1973, USA)

Directed by George Lucas; written by George Lucas and Gloria Katz & Willard Huyck; starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, and Wolfman Jack.

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