George Lucas tells the great American elegy – time.news

2023-08-11 07:12:43

by Philip Mazzarella

One of the greatest and most inimitable films of the New Hollywood of the seventies was released in America on August 11, 1973

Summer 1962. In an unspecified Californian town, four friends spend their last night as high school students. Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) should leave the next morning for college thanks to a scholarship offered by local merchants, but he is assailed by doubts; and after meeting a mysterious blonde driving a luxury car who sent him a silent “I love you” he sets out to find him. On his way he will meet the thugs Pharaohs of the stupid Joe (Bo Hopkins) with whom he will share a sort of initiation rite against the police and will end up asking for help from the legendary night deejay Lone Wolf/Wolfman Jack (himself) to broadcast a radio appeal to the woman.

But a bitter surprise awaits him. Steve (Ron Howard) should also go to study elsewhere: and his concern is instead to convince his longtime girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams), sister of Curt, that there would be nothing wrong if during his absence both had the freedom to date other people. However, the girl rejects the idea, and out of spite she will end up getting a lift on the Chevrolet of the braggart Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford), who as soon as he arrives in the city is looking everywhere for the popular John Milner (Paul LeMat) to challenge him to a clandestine race. The latter, a skilled mechanic, is as always aboard his 32 Ford Deuce Coupé, apparently a cart, intending to “tow”: and he finds himself having to deal with the petulant minor Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) who threatens to report him for rape if he doesn’t give her an “adult” night.

The last of the four is penniless nerd Terry (Charles Martin Smith), known as the Toad, the only one of the group who does not own his own car, to whom Steve has entrusted his luxurious Chevro Impala until his return. Thanks to it, he manages to get noticed by the flamboyant blonde Debbie (Candy Clark) who, despite the many misadventures (including the theft of the vehicle) caused by the boy’s inadequacy, will probably end up falling in love with her. At dawn, John and Falfa will finally compete, touching a tragedy that has only been postponed: as the final intertitles that reveal the future (sad, “normative” or mournful) of the four warn in part.

One of the greatest and most inimitable films of New Hollywood in the 1970s turns fifty (it was released in the USA on August 11, 1973; here only in April of the following year): “American Graffiti” by George Lucas, the director who that crucial season was perhaps the most singular, free, elusive, released; and undoubtedly the one that with the global success of “Star Wars” more than any other has also contributed to decreeing its end. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, co-written with Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, photographically immersed in an enveloping and material darkness by Jan D’Alquen and Ron Eveslage (but under the supervision of the genius Haskell Wexler) and masterfully staged by Dennis Clark, careful to reconstruct the sixties with a hyper-realistic detail worthy of Edward Hopper and in pursuit of a “reality” that always reveals its nature as a “set”, “American Graffiti” (the title, ingenious and emblematic, identifies in a decade still relatively ” close” a sort of “prehistory” of the United States) is the film that better than any other tells the great American elegy and the end of the “age of innocence”.

It does so with a structure disintegrated into syncopations, fragments, isolated events and probably dreamlike glimpses (like all of Curt’s journey, lost in the night chasing a ghost in an atmosphere bordering on dreams where nothing seems to possess the same figures of likelihood as parallel stories) held together seamlessly by a soundtrack of rock’n’roll classics crystallized in myth. Lucas recalls the dawn of the great American historical, social and cultural trauma: the assassination of JFK in 1963, the counterculture of 1968, the entry into the war in Vietnam, the decline of the old means of communication overwhelmed by the massive power of the new media ( of which the radio host Wolfman Jack is both memory and wreckage; as well as, symbolically, “father, angel, director, materialization of the unconscious of the four and of an entire nation” [Alberto Libera]).

But parallel to the metaphorical dimension, which imbues every frame, every dialogue, every implication with unease and bitterness, there is also a “light” comedy, permeated by Lucas’s sincere nostalgia for the years of his youth (a witness that will later be collected and also changed sign by Coppola an exact decade later with the diptych “The boys of 56th Street / The Outsiders” and “Rusty the wild / Rumble Fish”, both from 1983) and best served by an extraordinary cast. Only Candy Clark got an Oscar nomination as a supporting role, but everyone deserved it: from the dreamy Dreyfuss to Ron Howard – the future star of the show “Happy Days” and then in turn a Hollywood director of worth -, from the tender Smith to brittle fake hard LeMat; and there’s also Harrison Ford grappling with a kind of dress rehearsal of Han Solo’s bluster.

Equally unforgettable (and very expensive) is the soundtrack: 41 songs of the Golden Age rock ranging from the inevitable “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets to “All Summer Long” by the Beach Boys, crossing forgotten legends such as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Platters, Del Shannon and Fats Domino, with “live” contributions (like the phenomenal “At the Hop”) by Flash Cadillac & the Continental KIds. It was an unimaginable success at any latitude, which paved the way for an entire “nostalgic” trend not stingy with other masterpieces (one above all: “A Big Wednesday”, 1978, by John Milius. And six years later it originated a sequel/flop unknown to most but perhaps to be re-evaluated: “American Graffiti 2/More American Graffiti”, 1979, written and directed -with Lucas’ approval- by BWL Norton and focused on the future of the protagonists (except for the character of Dreyfuss) , found themselves in an America already profoundly changed and wounded in four episodes different in format, grain and editing set respectively on December 31st of four different years (1964, 1965, 1966 and 1967).

August 11, 2023 (change August 11, 2023 | 07:12)

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