Fast forward to 2015 and I just watched this movie last night on streaming. It wasn’t scooped, channeled, shaved, decked, pinstriped, or chopped, and it didn’t have duals, but its hubcaps were a wonder to behold. I first saw it in the late 1970s or early 1980s at one of Berkeley’s great repertory film theaters – the UC, the Rialto 4, or the Northside – that, along with the Pacific Film Archive (the last surviving relic of that bygone age), played such a huge role in my cinematic education (and that of any cinephile growing up in the East Bay before the arrival of video rental). He was an important sociologist from the 1950s to early 1980s, but virtually ignored in intellectual history.. I’ve always wanted to write an essay called “The Fifties happened *after* the Sixties” (and perhaps its sequel, “The Sixties happened *after* the Seventies”?). How to reposition the Fifties as something different, out of time, lost, nostalgized? Of the sound track, the song Green Onions to me was out of time. I agree both about (a particular version of) the Fifties as a distinctly Seventies construct (which made me think about the peculiar afterlife of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER in syndication in the ’70s) and about the actually complicated interplay of the Fifties and the Sixties…especially i/r/t rock and roll. It’s hard to remember that George Lucas was once just another of the New Hollywood directors, whose career took off with the enormous box-office success of this, his low-budget second film. Does every heart vibrate to the same exhausted media fare? Spike Lee Receives American Cinematheque Award, America Has to Come to a Reckoning: Director Sam Pollard on MLK/FBI, The TV Homages of WandaVision are an Amusing, Unfulfilling Distraction. Blessed with Steve’s Chevy Impala, Toad picks up Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark), whom he more or less successfully woos, despite lying to her, losing the car, getting sick on whiskey, and having his lies exposed. Originally intended as a project for Blake Edwards, the film version of Pierre Boule's semisatiric sci-fi novel came to the screen in 1968 under the directorial guidance of Franklin J. Schaffner. How many of these stories should we fill our heads with? Although it was released in 1962, the song leaned more towards the 60’s than the 50’s only in the sense that it was more of a Soul Funk type of music that a few years later would come to epitomize the 60’s era vibe. These brief, informative reviews, written for the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker, provide an immense range of listings---a masterly critical history of American and foreign film. Thanks for this, Andrew! It wasn’t scooped, channeled, shaved, decked, pinstriped, or chopped, and it didn’t have duals, but its hubcaps were a wonder to behold. Another kind of meditation and re-mediation on Vietnam occurred in the late 80s with all the Vietnam films (Platoon, etc.). [2]  The film’s setting was, for Lucas, of great autobiographical significance. Carol, who’s wearing a surfing-related shirt, praises the Beach Boys, for whom Wolfman Jack predicts great things before playing their 1962 hit “Surfin’ Safari.” ” I don’t like that surfing shit,” says John, “Rock ‘n Roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.”[8]. Can I lose – or recover — my innocence watching re-runs of events that occurred before I was born? Reeling. I guess this is not how the periodization goes in the literature most readers here are familiar with? Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. The options seemed so simple then: to go to college, or to stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene. Btw, I get your reference to the ‘long 50s’ but not to the ‘long 70s’. That Modesto in 1962 is almost entirely unmarked by what we think of—and American audiences in the 1970s would have thought of–as the Sixties makes its so-near-and-yet-so-distant world all the more poignant. The actual story of Fifties-Sixties interplay is far more complicated. Paperback. (Spoilers to follow[6]) American Graffiti focuses on four young men in Modesto in 1962. Found a copy of this 1974 review (in my opinion, one of Pauline Kael's best pieces of writing) on catholicforum.fisheaters.com Reprinting it here: THE EXORCIST Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 7, 1974 Shallowness that asks to be taken seriously—shallowness like William Peter Blatty's—is an embarrassment. Aren’t the 70s comparatively short? Indeed, the film opens with Bill Haley & His Comet’s iconic “Rock Around the Clock,” a 1954 hit (which would also come to serve as the theme to the early seasons of Happy Days). One of the few conversations about music takes place between John and Carol, who define the closest thing to an extended on-screen generation gap. Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982), for example, is pretty unimaginable without Lucas’s film preceding it. Alan Arkin Rafferty. That the main generation gap on screen is between the twenty-two-year-old John and the sixteen-year-old Carol (and that it involves the Beach Boys) suggests how established and stable is the movie’s version of Modesto youth culture in 1962. [1] It is still a vibrant and enjoyable little film, very much worth viewing. No other film critic is referenced. Cast & Crew. Suzanne Somers, Kathleen Quinlan, Debralee Scott, and Joe Spano also appear in the film. Modesto in 1962 is presented as a time when conflicts were local and manageable and challenges could be met and conquered. Finally, twenty-two year old John Milner (Paul le Mat) is living a kind of extended teen-age life as the town’s most famous hot-rod racer. Probably meant to be a rhetorical (or maybe Prufrockian) question, but on an individual level, no, obviously not. My first car was a ‘54 Ford and I bought it for $435. Hardcover. He displays no connection to those events. Ben, [Is this getting Prufrockian?]. The film is a nostalgic por… American Graffiti takes place in a world before the Kennedy Assassination changed politics, before the Beatles and the British Invasion changed popular music, and before the New Left, the counterculture, the Civil Right’s Movement,[3] second-wave feminism,[4] and the sexual revolution were felt in American society and culture (or at least in George Lucas’s version of Modesto). The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below: Whole cultures and societies have passed since 1962. At any rate, the more I read cultural criticism from the very early ’70s, the more I see American public intellectuals explicitly thinking about the meaning of the ’70s, trying to determine what the cultural and political changes they were seeing around them meant. [5] These last two series, in particular, bore a close relationship to American Graffiti. Pauline Kael began writing about movies for The New Yorker in 1967. http://www.framingthesixties.com. https://themudsill.substack.com/p/the-mudsill-vol-1-no-2?r=c1sab&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy, https://s-usih.org/2021/01/usih2021-in-dialogue-the-politics-of-black-freedom/ “American Graffiti” is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant. Time is spatialized, and culture is temporalized; we exist at their intersection, where they collapse into one another. But perhaps I miss the point. 4.3 out of 5 stars 9. And if the viewer somehow misses seeing the temporal divide that is, in a sense, the real subject of the film, there’s always that final set of titles. It’s weird how that works. Toad is killed in Vietnam. Steve never escapes the world of Modesto, which seems much less exciting from the point of view of an adult (what could be more dull than being an insurance agent?). Did it capture a bygone era of lost innocence? To find a movie title, click on a letter. Finally, I’m struck that the event haunting the final set of titles is not JFK’s assassination, but rather Vietnam. We compiled our rundown using data from the movie-review aggregation ... New Yorker's Pauline Kael called "childishly naïve." Even the film’s most apparently anti-establishment acts, which are initiated by the Pharaohs and culminate with Curt helping to rip the rear axel off a cop car, are played to emphasize Curt’s dealing with his coming-of-age rather than as serious challenges to authority. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood. Yes, Carol’s parents think she ought to avoid listening to Wolfman Jack, but they obviously represent no real bar to her doing so. Two young women kidnap a driving instructor so he can drive them to New Orleans. Parents are almost entirely absent (only Laurie and Curt’s parents appear, and then only at the very end of the movie to see their son off at the airport). The film ends with titles informing the audience what happened to its four, main male characters, about which I’ll have more to say in a moment. For instance, my father, who was in his early 20s when this hit the theaters, loves this movie. Intellectual History, he had an accident that nearly killed him, led Andrew Sarris, who liked, but didn’t love it, to compare Lucas’s “directorial personality at this early stage” to Godard and Fellini, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, the New York Dolls’ cover of Bo Diddley’s “Pills”. Although most critics loved American Graffiti some critics such as the influential Pauline Kael of THE NEW YORKER Magazine (1968-91), believed the film to be sexist. I rated both of them 4/5 stars on Letterboxd. Variety called the movie “nothing more than an updated ’70s version of the Sam Katzman rock music cheapies of the ’50s.” Other reviewers noted the … For him the characters in the movie would’ve been high schoolers he would’ve looked up to as a junior high student. 4.7 out of 5 stars 6. My dad grew up in a town “just south of Modesto,” and I grew up in a town just south of that, at a time when cruising the main drag was (and maybe still is) one of the only things to do on a warm summer night when the dusky purple sunset lingers in the west, and driving in you can smell the ripening peaches in the orchards outside of Modesto, or the grain fermenting in Purina silos on the railroad tracks in Turlock, or the onion dehydration plant in Livingston, or the tomatoes stewing through the graveyard shift in the cannery that backs up to Highway 99 in Atwater. the Fifties were long or the Sixties were short, but rather that the period of time I’m talking about is longer (or shorter) than the calendar decade in question. The Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” and the New York Dolls’ cover of Bo Diddley’s “Pills” (a song that itself comes from a rather different Fifties) are two great musical monuments to this interrelationship between the Fifties and Sixties (and beyond). Stanley Kauffmann, who liked it, complained in the New Republic that Lucas had made a film more fascinating to the generation now between thirty and forty than it could be for other generations, older or younger. Only two years earlier, WLS had been the Prairie Farmer Station; now it was the voice of rock all over the Midwest. by Pauline Kael Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. I can’t remember if Andrew has taken this on but certainly the intellectual device of “framing” is central to the argument. Can we ever stop crying about November 22, 1963? In her unprecedented attack on Pauline Kael, Renata Adler ignored most of what is in “When the Lights Go Down,” built herself a sandbag of references to reviews which are not even in the book, (i.e. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t imagine myself into the period, if the movie’s evocation is sufficiently compelling. At any rate, American Graffiti led Andrew Sarris, who liked, but didn’t love it, to compare Lucas’s “directorial personality at this early stage” to Godard and Fellini. Generational conflicts are absolutely foregrounded in both (in the form of an older woman and a young man), which strikes a diametrically opposite tone to your (excellent) reading of Graffiti. In 1962, not everyone was a high school kid, and many weren’t even born yet. Can I lose – or recover — my innocence watching re-runs of events that occurred before I was born? Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. Oddly enough, though, I will be addressing it very indirectly this Friday when I present a paper on The Phantom Menace at the Northeastern Political Science Association conference. “Where were you in ’62?” read the film’s principal tagline. The great divide was November 22, 1963,and nothing was ever the same again. American Graffiti is a 1973 American coming-of-age comedy film directed and co-written by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Bo Hopkins, and Wolfman Jack. of ‘The Modern World-System’, it’s b/c he thinks it makes sense, on some substantive grounds, to view c.1450-c.1640 as one epoch. $25.95 When the Lights Go Down. My coming of age years mirrored American Graffiti with the exception of the drag racing so close that I regard this movie as an autobiography of my own life to include going to war…the Cold War. https://theconstitutionalist.org/2021/01/12/elite-universities-have-promoted-destructive-republican-leaders-by-jeremi-suri/ #usih. I had watched it several times before and enjoyed it, as I did last night. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below: [I]it isn’t the age of the characters that matters; it’s the time they inhabited. As Ebert says, “the great divide was November 22, 1963, and nothing was ever the same again.” Not an utterly unique, but certainly a transformative moment …like December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001. ten years wanting to be forgotten). If she liked it so much, it couldn't be that good. American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film directed and co-written by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Wolfman Jack. My first car was a ‘54 Ford and I bought it for $435. The opinions expressed on the blog are strictly those of the individual writers and do not represent those of the Society or of the writers’ employers. "Nashville" is the kind of film scholars champion and no one else watches, which is a shame because it has a lot to offer, and not just to pointyheads. How many of these stories should we fill our heads with? Set in 1962 Modesto, California, American Graffiti is a study of the cruising and rock and roll cultures popular among the post–World War II baby boom generation. The other adult woman, critic Julie Rich (and based on Pauline Kael? Terry “Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith) is staying in town, but is delighted to be given Steve’s beautiful car to look after in the latter’s absence. But, from the perspective of 1973, Modesto in 1962 also sat just on the other side of the chasm that was the Sixties. For Keeps. That is, they do not constitute declarations that, e.g. Not kidding. That is, it seems to me there would be little point in talking, for example, about “the long fifties” unless one were prepared to argue that it makes sense, for some ‘substantive’ reason, to think of “the fifties” as extending beyond the year 1960 to 1963 or 1964 or whatever. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: A Library of America Special Publication at Amazon.com. 1. 1950s rock was never out of the picture in 60s countercultural rock: the bands kept playing Chuck Berry covers among their more artsy, weird, psychedelic explorations and of course Chuck Berry and other 50s rockers appeared on many of the double bills at the Fillmore Auditorium. The radio was on every waking moment. She was considered by many to be the most influential American film critic of the last 50 years. Both those films make a strong case for the necessity and inevitably of the Sixties upheavals, revealing a rottenness at the heart of, respectively, small-town society and the suburban bourgeoisie. Earlier, he was the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the drama critic for The New York Times and the first regular drama critic at The New Yorker. ... (and Pauline Kael for that matter). George Lucas, trying to locate people to play teenagers in American Graffiti, saw the pilot and hired former child star Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in what would become Happy Days) as part of his ensemble cast in American Graffiti. But my father’s experience as a high school student, and as a h.s. Eventually, Al’s Diner in Milwaukee would come to serve a similar role in Happy Days to Mel’s Diner in Modesto in American Graffiti. After a series of adventures that include trying to locate a mysterious blonde (Suzanne Somers) in a white T-Bird (who might have said “I love you” to Curt through its closed window) and proving his manhood with the local Pharoahs gang, Curt eventually finds the inner strength to leave town and attend the unnamed college in the East. Hardcover. But I do get why it can be tiresome to be treated to an orgy of nostalgia for an era one didn’t experience personally. The pilot for the show, originally entitled New Family in Town was actually filmed for ABC in 1971 with the cast that would eventually appear in Happy Days. Michael. The new owner has promised to … As I search around for things to think about, I keep coming back to visions of the pre-Sixties American past in the long 1970s. Contact. Other than a couple of Asian and African American faces briefly glimpsed in the high school sock hop scene and a couple of (probably) Latino members of the Pharoahs gang (neither of whom has many lines), the large ensemble cast is entirely white. The Society for U.S. More generally, one needn’t believe in such a substantive reason if, e.g., one happens to be writing about texts produced by people who believed in such a substantive reason. American Enterprise Institute 1789 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Main telephone: 202.862.5800 Main fax: 202.862.7177 I especially like your closing thought, that Lucas represents “a milder, but in certain ways more culturally powerful, form of conservative response to the Sixties,” but I wonder if we could contextualize this not just in light of Lucas’s advancement of an autobiographically grounded vision of the sixties, but also as a more or less direct response to other New Hollywood films, especially Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and Nichols’s The Graduate (1967). 1, No. © 2007—2021 Society for U.S. The film, then, as Ben notes, can be seen as a kind of wishing away of that trouble—if it was not, precisely, nostalgia for the fifties itself. All in all, as a kid coming of age in central California, I could relate to the movie, the characters, and the lack of certain cross sections of 1960s Americana. Whole cultures and societies have passed since 1962. At least the way I use terms like “the long Fifties” or “the short Sixties,” the adjectives are intended to be restrictive. I wonder if a fair amount of subsequent fifties nostalgia isn’t about the 1950s at all, but rather about denial—a search for *any* place or time better than the 1960s, or better even the 1970s as Peter N. Carroll portrayed the decade (i.e. 1970 to 1979 [remove] 85; Document: publication year range begin – Document: publication year range end. Such writers certainly didn’t think they were living out the “long Sixties”! All the elements were there for me, friends going off to college, struggling with the fact that I wasnt going to college, using a borrowed car, friends with girlfriends, getting an adult to buy us booze, picking up chicks on the strip, racing from signal light to signal light, cruising, messing with the cops, car clubs, 50’s music mixed in with “classic” Rock, having that one moment when you see the woman of your dreams and her being just out of your reach fading with the coming dawn, and yes…enlisting to go fight the Red hoard. So “the 70s,” culturally and politically, is really just the mid/late 70s, I wd have said, maybe extending to 1981, but still less than a full decade. Suzanne Somers, Kathleen Quinlan, Debralee Scott, and Joe Spano also appear in the film. As far as coming-of-age tales go, American Graffiti feels like the promise that the future once held in my youth, whereas The Last Picture Show feels like the grim reality I should have expected. In 1962, George Lucas was, like two of the film’s principal characters, a high school senior in Modesto. Originally intended as a project for Blake Edwards, the film version of Pierre Boule's semisatiric sci-fi novel came to the screen in 1968 under the directorial guidance of Franklin J. Schaffner. January 11, 2018 Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It’s the war, and the ways it touched everyone’s immediate, personal body and life, that seems to cast the shadow over American Graffiti’s look back at the Fifties—and it’s the war, we might say, that created the rupture—with all the suggested sorrows, nostalgia, and sense of loss—between the Fifties of American Graffiti and the Sixties that followed? In ’62, when the movie is set, I was five yrs old and, though I had been born in the U.S., was living abroad at that point. I saw it for the first and only time in 2008 and only a few scenes are still vivid (but that’s often the way I remember movies). In American Graffiti Lucas created the illusion of compressing a … The only mention of race in the film comes when one character says that her parents won’t let her listen to the ubiquitous Wolfman Jack at home “because he’s a Negro” (in fact, he isn’t). Thanks again! The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. To me, the movie struck a cord because living just south of Modesto there were elements that we practiced even into the late 70’s such as cruising, the absence of adult supervision in adolescence socialization, the racial make-up and the Vietnam War still fresh in our minds. It’s an interesting philosophy of history question, whether a work set in the past should contain some indication of what happened after the period in which it is set, especially if the time after it is set was one of great dislocation and change, as is the case here. Do you remember where you were in 1973 ? Articles & Reviews; Notes; Brief Synopsis. Are we all the same person? … I mean, when you watched the movie … for the first, or fifteenth, time? I don’t know how I missed it before, but none of the female characters were in the “what became of them” segment at the end of the movie! As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. John, apparently through no fault of his own, ends up killed by an automobile, the fate he vaguely feared in the movie (and the fear of which led George Lucas himself away from hot-rods and toward movies). That seemed to be one of the projects in American Graffiti and similar cultural material. What was to come would not be so simple. But, when memory and history seem determined to form into archetype, or better stereotype, when it seems that events exist only to give an aura of newness to forms that compulsively repeat, you have to wonder what’s up, and that perhaps history has ended [for now], and it’s our fate to live in an endless loop of shared re-runs of the loss of innocence, perhaps hoping to recover it. Mean Streets: Everyday Inferno – Review by Pauline Kael. Sorry – that’s “slowly returning” in the next-to-last paragraph. Though it’s debatable, “the sixties” as the phrase is generally used in the U.S. context lasts, I wd have said, until c.1973 (if not a year or two beyond). Thanks for this extremely rich comment, Michael! (At one point I actually asked myself, "I wonder just what Professor Killan things of this, not what Pauline Kael does".) “American Graffiti”‘s sound track is papered from one end to the other with Wolfman Jack’s nonstop disc jockey show, that’s crucial and absolutely right. C’mon Lucas. The evil General Kael was named after Pauline Kael, the distinguished film critic for The New Yorker from 1968-1991. What’s perhaps most striking about the film is that, until the end titles over movie’s very last shot, Lucas doesn’t even hint at the changes to come. Photo Credit: Juno Films. Others included: Elvis’s comeback special (1968); the vocal group Sha Na Na, formed at Columbia University in 1969 just before appearing at Woodstock (they eventually got their own syndicated TV variety show, which ran from 1977 to 1981); the Broadway musical Grease (1971), which eventually became a film in 1978; and the TV shows Happy Days (1974-1984) and Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983).[5]. Or to put it another way, it’s a matter of narrative and perspective, viz., whose perspective is to be privileged, the characters’ or the narrator’s? I avoided it for years because of Pauline Kael's iconographic reviews in the New Yorker. by Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael . Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Read Movie and TV reviews from Pauline Kael on Rotten Tomatoes, where critics reviews are aggregated to tally a Certified Fresh, Fresh or Rotten Tomatometer score. And following an evening driving around and essentially playing older brother to the much younger Carol Morrison (McKenzie Phillips), John races Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford), who has been driving around town trying to meet John in order to beat him at his game. by Anonymous: reply 22: 09/21/2014: Kael was a great but deeply flawed critic. What all of these cultural products featured was more-or-less instant nostalgia for a past that was very close in time but seemed extremely culturally distant from the world of the long 1970s. Other authority figures from the characters’ parents’ generation are few and far between. Well, he essentially repeats what Pauline Kael likes and dislikes, quoting her verbatim a LOT! Can we ever stop crying about November 22, 1963? The lack of conflict around the youth culture on display in American Graffiti is one of the most notable things about the film. Pauline Kael Reviews A-Z. 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