In what I hope will be a continuing, though probably sporadic, series, let ol’ Lushy take your hand and guide you through the dingier recesses of popular culture: movies, music and books. Unlike Dante’s Virgil, it won’t be a tour through pop culture hell, more a kind of purgatory, where the oddballs, heroic failures and unsung geniuses languish in obscurity. Remember: just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good. And many acknowledged greats were long ignored: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life was a box-office flop that didn’t find widespread appreciation until decades later. Ditto, John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece, The Thing.
Still you’ve surely heard of them now.
Allow me to be your guide to the ones you probably haven’t.
American Graffiti is the film that truly launched George Lucas’ career. His debut, THX-1138, like John Carpenter’s Dark Star adapted from a student film, made little critical or box office impact. That all changed with American Graffiti. Capitalising on the Boomers’ fetish for nostalgia even while they were still in their 20s, American Graffiti was a smash hit.
More American Graffiti didn’t appear until six years later, even though Lucas had long felt he wanted to do a sequel. But the original’s producer, Francis Ford Coppola, didn’t think sequels were a good idea (perhaps he should have taken his own advice before making The Godfather III), so the idea was shelved and Lucas plunged into what would become the cinematic behemoths, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Still, the idea lingered and eventually Lucas hand-picked Bill L Norton to direct the long-delayed sequel.
In a curious case of both synchronicity and incredibly bad timing, More American Graffiti, with extended sequences set in Vietnam, opened on the same weekend as Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now.
As it happens, I saw it on that first run, as a support feature for Get Smart: The Nude Bomb. I remember nothing about the Get Smart movie, other than vaguely recalling that it was terrible. Something about More American Graffiti, though, grabbed me. I certainly never forgot it.
Revisiting the film decades later, my memories were confirmed. More American Graffiti is not, maybe, a great film, but it’s a pretty damn good one. It certainly doesn’t deserve the critical drubbing it received. Had the gods of timing been kinder, it might have done far better at the box office, too.
After all, it brought back most of the original cast, some of whom (Ron Howard, Cindy Williams) had gone on to stardom of their own. Even Harrison Ford makes a brief reappearance as a motorcycle cop. It has a great soundtrack (I’d argue, better than the original), and a compelling storyline.
It’s the manner in which that story is told, though, that I suspect was the reason for critical hostility. The story is told in a semi-non-linear format, with changing aspect ratios, pictures-in-pictures, and other unusual cinematic devices. Gene Siskel dubbed it, “one long confusing movie”. “A mess of time shifts and pointless, confusing split-screen techniques,” grumbled the New Yorker. Variety called it “one of the most innovative and ambitious films of the last five years, but by no means is it one of the most successful”.
Where American Graffiti is a coming-of-age drama set on a single New Year’s Eve in 1962, More American Graffiti is more of a loss-of-innocence tale set over four consecutive New Year’s Eves from 1964 to 1967. The events of each are interspersed with each other in a similar style to, perhaps, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. As Marty McFly had said to another group of American teenagers a decade earlier, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”
As well as the non-linear storytelling, the film uses different cinematic techniques to emphasise the unique qualities of each New Year’s Eve. The 1965 ‘Vietnam’ sequences are shot on hand-held 16mm, capturing the feel of war-correspondent footage (a technique that won accolades for Steven Spielberg accolades, two decades later), while 1966 ‘hippy’ sequences uses split screens and multiple angles of the same event simultaneously on screen, in the style of the Woodstock documentary film.
The individual sequences serve to emphasise the massive social dislocations that rocked the US in those four short years. The 1964 sequence, set at a drag race, echoes the youthful optimism of the original John Milner (Paul Le Mat), still racing cars and chasing girls – and maybe finally finding the One. Terry the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) cheerfully announces that he’s joined the army and is shipping out to Vietnam that night. Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams) is pregnant and getting married to Steve Bolander (Ron Howard).
By the next New Year’s, Terry is in Vietnam and thoroughly jaded with the war. Desperate to get out, he embarks on a series of elaborate schemes to injure himself, all of which comically fail. In the end, he manages to stage a fake death and is last seen hiking through the jungle, Europe-bound, whistling “Auld Lang Syne”.
Back home in the US, in 1966, optimism still prevails. Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark) is a free-spirited hippy in San Francisco, just as the Haight-Ashbury scene is bursting into life.
By 1967, though, Steve and Laurie are feeling the strain of marriage and kids and the growing tension of Laurie wanting to be more than a housewife clashing with Steve’s more ‘1950s’ aspirations. The mood in America in general has also turned darker, as shown when the nice suburban couple get inadvertently caught up in a violent campus anti-draft riot.
The story cleverly works within the constraints set up by American Graffiti itself, which famously ends with a series of vignettes detailing the ultimate fates of the characters, including that Terry is MIA, presumed dead, in Vietnam. Even though we know, then, how the story ‘ends’, it’s the telling that matters. Certainly, I well recall, in that cinema in 1979, the audible gasp when the audience realised that it culminates in the night John Milner, having finally found love, is killed by a drink-driver.
It’s definitely, as Variety conceded, ambitious and innovative. But Variety was also right that it wasn’t entirely successful. While the non-linear plot is no problem for anyone even half paying attention to follow, some of the techniques maybe don’t work so well. The Woodstock techniques of the 1966 segments are perhaps faithful to their time, but end up as a consequence looking the most dated. All in all, the 1966 segment is the weakest.
The strongest, to my mind, is the 1965 Vietnam sequence. Charles Martin Smith steals the show here, as the no-longer-nerdy, but still hapless Terry. These scenes are basically a shorter, funnier M.A.S.H. (both the excruciatingly un-funny Robert Altman film and the preachy TV series). This was, ironically perhaps, the sequence which drew most critical ire. In 1979, Americans perhaps weren’t quite ready to laugh about Vietnam and, with the darkly epic Apocalypse Now dominating in theatres, More American Graffiti lost by comparison.
So, not exactly the greatest movie you’ll ever see, but a fun and clever film that’s worth the look that almost nobody ever gave it.
