pauline kael american graffiti review
Though American Graffiti was a deeply autobiographical project for Lucas, it was sold as much more generalized nostalgia. Though the film wasn't a box office smash, it got strong reviews from critics, especially Pauline Kael, who praised Dreyfuss for his energetic performance. And part of the effectiveness of American Graffiti, I think, is Lucas’s decision not to foreshadow those changes until that final title card. Modesto in 1962 is presented as a time when conflicts were local and manageable and challenges could be met and conquered. 1993? The film is greatly helped by the participation of a couple of New Hollywood’s most extraordinary talents: the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who served as a “visual consultant” for the film, and sound designer Walter Murch, who not only created the film’s innovative, largely diegetic, use of rock and roll, but apparently also suggested using Wolfman Jack’s broadcasts to link its stories together. 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. Kael’s legendary essay-review about Bonnie and Clyde was published in 1967 in the New Yorker. 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 … If she liked it so much, it couldn't be that good. Only two years earlier, WLS had been the Prairie Farmer Station; now it was the voice of rock all over the Midwest. Ah, but it was Richard Nixon who won the day in ’68 and in a landslide in ’72. On August 1, 1973, George Lucas brought his nostalgic film American Graffiti to the big screen at the Avco Cinema Center in Los Angeles. For a movie about rock-and-roll and youth culture, American Graffiti features remarkably little rebellion or anti-establishment sentiment. He can go to college in a year, he says. $25.95 When the Lights Go Down. That June, he had an accident that nearly killed him, which led him to give up cars, go to junior college, and, eventually pursue film-making. Pauline Kael’s Most Passionate Reviews, From ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ to ‘Taxi Driver’ Thumbnails. Anyway, the whole point is sort of peripheral to the post, which I did like. Save this story for later. History becomes a series of “cultural instants,” incommensurable wholes instantly transformed — call it the “Great Moment” theory of history. Though all four appear to triumph over the personal challenges they face within the plot of American Graffiti, their fates prove to be tragic or ambivalent. Tags: .USIH Blog, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, cultural history, Culture Wars, film. [1] It is still a vibrant and enjoyable little film, very much worth viewing. On August 1, 1973, George Lucas brought his nostalgic film American Graffiti to the big screen at the Avco Cinema Center in Los Angeles. [I]it isn’t the age of the characters that matters; it’s the time they inhabited. Search this site Go Ask a ... Lucas is a real filmmaker. Time is spatialized, and culture is temporalized; we exist at their intersection, where they collapse into one another. 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. The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. I guess what I’m trying to ask is, is there a way we can shorten the presumed distance between the conservatism of nostalgia and the conservatism of “backlash”? Though Bob and Laurie (who was riding with him) escape apparently unharmed, Bob’s car goes up in flames as dawn breaks. In 1962, not everyone was a high school kid, and many weren’t even born yet. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. And, have we come any farther since he wrote those lines, whatever that might mean? I have no answer to the question. So the film took a micro view of a few characters in a small town encapsulated, but only at the end, in a micro-macro view of a sliver of the issues of the day circa 1963. 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. 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. Two young women kidnap a driving instructor so he can drive them to New Orleans. 2003 ? 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. Did it capture a bygone era of lost innocence? Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Hardcover. It’s very tiresome. I hated her review of "American Graffiti." For me, though, I find American Graffiti and its amazing, underrated, sequel in good company with that Galaxy Far, Far Away. 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. Was it a poorly made movie with giant holes in the plot? Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. The history of American film criticism. But in fact, the film took place only eleven years before the year in which it was made. ), is an outsider looking for a pat "answer" to Hannaford's mysteries, and whose sallies in this direction also shed light while her conclusion should be rejected as, well, pat and simplistic. As readers of this blog probably already know – and as a roundtable on the history of the Culture Wars at this year’s S-USIH Conference, which included among its participants three of our bloggers (Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and L.D. 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. In American Graffiti Lucas created the illusion of compressing a … 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. Directed by Gerald Peary. Can I lose – or recover — my innocence watching re-runs of events that occurred before I was born? Are we slowing returning to history as individual biography writ large? The music thus evokes not a year, but an era, and one about to come to an end. 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. In fact, American Graffiti as a whole became a cinematic template. Dick Richards Director. For him the characters in the movie would’ve been high schoolers he would’ve looked up to as a junior high student. A character in the movie only realizes his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop: He didn’t hear the car being driven away. In 1962, George Lucas was, like two of the film’s principal characters, a high school senior in Modesto. A 1966 movie review by Pauline Kael on Jean-Luc Godard, who turns 85 today. 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. Somehow, by American Graffiti and early 1970s, these were being more strictly differentiated and separated even though, in practice, there were many continuities, both good and bad—or maybe better said, there were, all along, many recombinations occurring between perceived old and new forms and attitudes. 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). They were almost too confusing to comprehend. With Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Jami Bernard. We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. by Pauline Kael. Deep from the annals of my VHS archive: the great Pauline Kael muses about writing film criticism. Monday, January 23, 2012. 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. It sounds like we grew up a few decades apart, but maybe not so far apart on the map. graduate, came in the heart of those tumultuous 1960s. Wow and geeze! Alan Arkin Rafferty. Paperback. Burnett), suggested – to a great extent the Culture Wars of the Eighties reflected a series of Seventies cultural conversations about the legacy of the Sixties. When I went to see George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” that whole world -- a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent -- was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture shock. “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. Those dirty hippies get all the ink and the screen time, but Nixon got the votes. Does every heart vibrate to the same exhausted media fare? Thank you for this fantastic post. … I mean, when you watched the movie … for the first, or fifteenth, time? 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. Very interesting question (especially since backlashy conservatism very often features its own aggressive brands of nostalgia). Fast forward to 2015 and I just watched this movie last night on streaming. 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. Tweet. 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. 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?). We ever stop crying about November 22, 1963 that Nixon guy got plenty of ink and the screen,! Like to see it again actually familiar with includes songs from the Chicago Reader “ long Sixties!! 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