Let's be honest. Not every movie on Netflix is a classic. But American Graffiti is deserving of the label: while George Lucas' later movies may be more famous – you may have heard of them; something about space battles and then a historian with a hat – it's a wonderful period piece about the end of teenage innocence. And it's got a great soundtrack too.
Why American Graffiti is a classic movie
Lucas' 1973 movie is deceptively simple: it follows a group of teenagers over the course of a single night in 1962 in Modesto, California. They cruise the main street, they go to the drive-through, they listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and they do the kinds of things you do when you're a teenager with nothing to do. But as Roger Ebert explained, "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."
The film was already nostalgic for a disappearing age when it was made in the early 70s, and it's even more of a period piece now. But time hasn't lessened its considerable charm, and while the soundtrack seems awfully polite – the setting predates the more raucous rock era that came later in the decade – it's still packed with great songs.
This was the 1960s before the Kennedy assassination and US troops in Vietnam, and for Movie Nation it was Lucas' The Great Gatsby: "his statement on his generation, and looking back that as popular as his later works became, this was his masterpiece."
One of the things about American Graffiti is that it can make you nostalgic for an era you didn't live through, and a life that not everyone of that age at that time lived. As the Chicago Daily News wrote, "I'm not sure I would have enjoyed their way of life, but it's a great one to remember, even if you didn't live it yourself, and it makes American Graffiti the ultimate nostalgia movie -- certainly the best teen-myth movie since Rebel Without a Cause."
As a film from a certain era, with a different kind of pace and look, not everyone might put it among the best Netflix movies, but it's an iconic piece of movie history that everyone should see once.
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