Review: George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’ on Universal 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Even more than his long-time colleague and friend, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas is the boy who never grew up. For one, Star Wars is so inspired by sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and the WWII dogfight movies that his imagined sci-fi universe feels oddly antiquated, and befitting its setting in a moment “a long, long time ago.” No less fitting is that American Graffiti, Lucas’s breakout hit, is a love letter to his youth in the 1950s and ’60s, and that it’s become the ur-text of the nostalgia movie as a subgenre. Everything from Happy Days to The Big Chill lives in its shadow, though given the shininess of the film’s surfaces, from the neon-lit drive-ins to chrome-plated cars that have been buffed to perfection, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the film’s descendants are illuminated by its gleaming glow.

American Graffiti has the most threadbare of plots. It follows the escapades of a group of high school graduates as they cruise around Modesto, California, at the end of the summer of 1962. Whiz kid Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) drifts around town in an anxious state over leaving his friends behind to go to college and falls in with a relatively benign gang of greasers; Steve (Ron Howard), who’s also college-bound, is heading east, and as such attempts to navigate an uncertain future with his girlfriend (Cindy Williams); and hot-rodder John (Paul Le Mat) shows off his heavily modified car to all the other teens driving around Modesto’s streets before eventually being drawn into a drag race with rival gearhead Bob (Harrison Ford).

The closest thing here to a dramatic arc belongs to sweet, awkward geek Terry (Charles Martin Smith), who borrows Curt’s car and spends all night attempting to pose as a cool guy as he trips into a series of mishaps. Among his travails is the theft of his loaner wheels while trying to impress a pretty girl (Candy Clark) more charmed by his haplessness than his faux suaveness.

The primary interest of American Graffiti, though, is its setting and the nostalgia that it conjures. Writing has never been Lucas’s strong suit, but the film’s screenplay (co-written with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck) captures the believable voice of youth standing on the precipice of adulthood and clinging to one last show of juvenilia. The characters here sound at once like they want to seem mature while also fleeing from all the weight of actual maturity.

The film also lovingly recreates the minutiae of the era, from the preppy clothing to the outrageous tail fins on cars. There are no real narrative stakes here, not even when a climactic drag race takes a dangerous turn akin to the finale of Rebel Without a Cause. Instead, at a time when Lucas’s colleagues were unpacking the mass disillusionment of the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate eras, the filmmaker ran back into the comforting embrace of a simpler time.

It’s telling that the film’s most wounding moment involves the revelation that legendary DJ Wolfman Jack, heard scatting and filling time on the local rock station, doesn’t operate out of the area but is instead, per the station DJ (Wolfman himself), a syndicated voice reciting pre-recorded bits. The characters believe rock ‘n’ roll is the sound of youthful rebellion, but in an instant it’s made clear that the rock revolution has been corporatized and syndicated for mass consumption, and the Beatles haven’t even gotten out of Hamburg nightclubs yet.

Curt discovers this while trying to get the Wolfman to send out a dedication, and he ends up roaming around the station’s record library in a daze—like Dorothy peeking behind the curtain to find that the Wizard of Oz is just an ordinary man. And even when a glumly departing Curt spies the DJ launching into Wolfman’s yowl, the revelation that he just got pranked is captured in an extreme long shot from the young man’s point of view—the faint sliver of Wolfman visible at the end of a dark hallway suggesting that a spell has been broken forever.

Wolfman’s status as a disembodied voice is integral to sense of transience imparted by the film. American Graffiti is pointedly set in the final dwindling months before the October Crisis set the ball rolling on the chaotic social and political upheavals of the decade. Early on, one girl mentions that her sweetheart’s dream is to shake the hand of John F. Kennedy, who would be assassinated just over a year later. The film’s end titles tell the fates of the characters—from Terry being reported missing in Vietnam, to John being killed by a drunk driver, to Steve becoming an insurance agent in Modesto. It’s the film’s sobering acknowledgement that the cocoon of safety erected around the characters is about to come crashing down around them.

Image/Sound

From the very first frame of the film, Universal’s 4K transfer is, in a word, disastrous. Heavy digital noise reduction has clearly been applied to the entire movie, but in a baffling twist, it appears that a sheen of fake film grain has been reapplied over this aggressive scrubbing, suggesting an escaped convict hastily covering his tracks. This results in an image gallingly lacking in texture and detail. Some of the darker shots are so murky and washed out that they look like they came right off of a VHS rip, and color bleed is heavy throughout. Only when the frame captures well-lit, mostly inanimate objects does anything look overly pleasing to the eye, but in all other respects this is one of the worst ultra-high-def presentations of the year.

The audio options fare a little better. The disc comes with a 5.1 remix and a stereo fold-up of American Graffiti’s original mono, and both feature jarring separation issues that leave dialogue, pointedly blended with street noise and music in the film, stranded in its own channel, and sounding as unnatural as a dub track. At least the rousing rock soundtrack is bolstered by these mixes, with added bass and clear treble giving maximum bite to golden oldies.

Extras

Universal ports over all the extras from its 2011 Blu-ray release of the film, the most notable being a commentary track by George Lucas, who offers a wistful but sometimes pragmatic breakdown of the modestly budgeted and slightly frantic production. There’s also a 76-minute documentary that covers the making of American Graffiti and its massive theatrical success in thorough detail, as well as some screen test footage of the lead actors.

Overall

George Lucas’s massively influential nostalgia fest receives a sadly dismal transfer in one of the year’s most disappointing UHD releases.