American Graffiti (1973)

Another ticked box in the quest to hunt down all the possible origins of one of my favourite films, American Pie (1999), the trail should really have led to George Lucas’ teen flick a lot sooner. And it’s without the best direction of Lucas’ career, his insistence on not taking a backseat with Star Wars led to a lot of tosh (A New Hope [1977] remains the best of them by a distance) but American Graffiti is the work of someone extremely focused on a single idea, and not having to faff about stretching several stories across several galaxies. I couldn’t imagine a huge number of films owing a debt to Lucas (which seems a ludicrous thing to say about the man who invented Star Wars) but that was before I saw American Graffiti. The film is based over one night (forcing Lucas to focus) after the class of 1962 graduate from high school in Modeso, California. The various teenagers we’re introduced to (including a young Ron Howard) spend the evening cruising the strip of the town, with the focus on the cars themselves and the neon lighting sheen of the town which adds a welcome Noir sheen to proceedings. The film works as a study of the cruising (of the driving kind, not the Al Pacino in Cruising kind) and early rock ‘n’ roll culture, with the soundtrack to the film being familiar to pretty much everyone who watches it. Some of the humour would never make it past social media scrutiny today, but once again that sort of approach is akin to arresting George Lucas for being seventy nine years old. It’s Lucas’ best film, and its slightly kooky and strange characters add to its charm as you’d expect; although it’s not a masterpiece as many claim, it’s certainly a hugely important document in the teen comedy drama genre, as well as being proof that Lucas can direct. Someone just needs to hand him a script that’s as shoehorned and restrained in scope as American Graffiti. 7.6/10