The 1973 box office and critical smash American Graffiti epitomized the 1950s nostalgia craze, established the device of interweaving multiple stories, inspired such television series as Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, and boosted the careers of...

American Graffiti is a 1973 film directed by George Lucas. Set in 1962 in small-town California, it follows a group of middle-class teenagers on the last night of the summer vacation after their graduation from high school. The events take place against...

MIKE KELLY The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 02-16-1993 AMERICAN GRAFFITI By MIKE KELLY Date: 02-16-1993, Tuesday Section: NEWS Edition: All Editions -- 3 Star, 2 Star P, 2 Star B, 1 Star Late, 1 Star Early To talk to Asian Indians in...

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The American Film Institute's original 1998 list of the top-100 American movies:1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.2. "Casablanca," 1942.3. "The Godfather," 1972.4. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.5. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.6. "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.7. "The Graduate," 1967.8. "On the Waterfront," 1954.9. "Schindler's List," 1993.10. "Singin'...

The American Film Institute's 2007 list of the top-100 American movies:1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.2. "The Godfather," 1972.3. "Casablanca," 1942.4. "Raging Bull," 1980.5. "Singin' in the Rain," 1952.6. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.7. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.8. "Schindler's List," 1993.9. "Vertigo," 1958.10. "The Wizard of Oz,"...

[American Graffiti] imports more than mere nostalgia for a past: it explores the consequences of technology upon an age that still has the need to understand experience through a mixture of epic, myth, and romance patterns. American Graffiti's achievement—or near-achievement—is that it gives us a chance to satisfy this need, to find these patterns, in a mundane, all-too-familiar mechanized world. The mythic land of American Graffiti is a country of city streets under the false day of re...

[In American Graffiti] Lucas and his fellow writers, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, manage to be serious without portentous symbolism or heavy underlining. They slip on an end title which they should have let the audience write for itself but, otherwise, their poise is flawless; the car crash at the end, to take the most obvious example, has not been inflated into an apocalypse. Despite its crowded sound track and its mesmerizing flow of images, American Graffiti is a low-keyed, unpretentious movie. Yet it ...

Using women (and not only women) as plot functions may be a clue to the shallowness of many movies, even of much better movies—American Graffiti, for example. The audience at American Graffiti appears to be ecstatically happy condescending toward its own past—how cute we were at seventeen, how funny, how lost—but for women the end of the picture is a cold slap. Set in 1962, American Graffiti compresses into one night the events from high school graduation to the opening of college in th...