Tuesday 8 July 2014

Freeview film of the day : tuesday 8th of July

American Graffiti (1973 107min.) [Film4 1.15am wednesday &+1]

Coming-of-age comedy drama directed by George Lucas, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard (billed here as Ronny). California 1962: four high-school graduates face up to their futures during a summer's night spent driving around the streets and chasing girls.

"Where were you in '62?"

With High School behind them and their futures due to start in the morning a group of friends spend the night cruising the strip in their small California hometown, listening to Wolfman Jack on the radio and getting involved in small but significant adventures.

Lucas graduated from the same film school as Francis Ford Coppola and Spielberg and while the former had The Godfather (1972) on his CV already and the latter was just a couple of years from changing the face of mainstream US cinema for ever with Jaws, Lucas only had the failure of his debut feature THX 1138 (1971), a dreary and dull sci-fi film to show for his talent and ambition.

Taking a back-to-basics approach he decided that if audiences didn't want to join him in a journey into the future he would take them back into his past. American Graffiti is an amalgam of events and people he recalled from his teenage years growing up in Modesto, California.

The central characters are composite stereotypes - Richard Dreyfus is the smart, sensitive loner; Ron(ny) Howard the conflicted All American teen; Paul Le Mat is John, the grease monkey car enthusiast whose interests extend no further than the Strip and his place on it and Charlie Martin Smith is the partial outsider - the nerd/dweeb whose loyalty and friendship is valued sufficently by the "cool kids" to allow them to tolerate his presence on the fringes of their activity.

From these building blocks Lucas and his co-writers then fashioned a believable world for them to live in - a world where small events are inflated to life-changing proportions and where it's safe to stay out all night and indulge in your favourite pastimes while the police and parents take a "boys will be boys" atttitude and the worst that can happen is your car gets wrecked or your heart gets (temporarily) broken.

The script, the cast, the recognisable near-past world and the direction are all spot on the money : it's a beautifully paced movie with moments of high energy counterpointed by smaller, quieter ones of reflection and repose. And it's funny; the script crackles and fizzes with great lines, clever physical gags and an overall sense of fun and innocence.

And then there's the soundtrack : a perfectly chosen selection of pre-Beatles teen pop that both acts as a background for events and as a commentary upon them. The inclusion of the voice of legendary cult rock'n'roll DJ Wolfman Jack and his anarchic links between records is inspired and adds another layer to the beautifully constructed sense of time and place.

Yet nagging away in the background all the time is the spectre of Vietnam : the kids of American Graffiti's world were the last for a generation who were able to indulge in such simple pleasures and dream of brighter futures without the fear of the draft and death in a foreign country hanging over them at every step. The war is never mentioned but it's there in the background all the time; as is the looming moment when American youth lost it's sense of innocence for ever.

JFK gets a passing mention, just enough to jerk you back from the lost fantasy world to the cold hard reality that's about to impinge on the lives of these (mostly) carefree young people in the most brutal way.

Lucas adds a postscript screen card that updates the story of the four main players ; two are dead, both well before their time, in senseless killings while two others have lived out their lives in almost excatly the way that we would have imagined. The physical location given for the grown-up Curt suggests that the Vietnam War was also a life changing event for him even though he never fought in it.

American Graffiti is an outstanding film that shows a film maker finding his populist touch and creating a fully functioning world for his characters to live in; an ability that he would develop further with his next projects which would reward him with enormous financial wealth but declining artistic recognition and respect.

For the time it's on screen the film is perfect, loveable and wholly believable - the kids are alright and so is everything else in the world. It's only as the end credits role that we realise that these certanties were to be gone for ever within a few short months and that there's no going back in the real world to a time of soda pop and fries at the drive-in with the thumping beat of rock'n'roll radio as your constant companion.

A genuine classic of mainstream American cinema.

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