“Where were you in '62?” the ads for American Graffiti ask. Wherever I was I recall doing my best to stay out of earshot of the kind of Alan Freed-style music which washes over the film from start to finish as pervasively as the very air that's breathed. Curiously, that music has become more bearable to me—detoxified, as it were, by my knowledge that it's now (at least outside this picture) escapable, and by the fact that even graduates of the generation that once devoured it now recognize it mainly to have been trash. (“Rock-‘n’-roll's been goin' downhill since Buddy Holly died,” one of the film's characters remarks, which, along with some speculation on whether a girl looks more like Connie Stevens or Sandra Dee, is about as close as the film gets to open condescension.) But those whose music it once was feel nostalgia for it, and for the period American Graffiti evokes; I don't. And for them the film's nonstop spectacle of grooving with disc jockey “Wolfman Jack,” eating “Chubby Chuck burgers” at Mel's Drive-In, and cruising all night in their cars has an anthropological significance which for me inheres rather in jumping with “Symphony Sid,” eating fried soft-shell crab sandwiches in the back of Grant's, and dozing over the Sunday Times on the E train at 3 A.M. on Sunday morning while trying not to sleep past one's stop; and the very fact that I'm as incapable of responding to their cherished memorabilia as they to mine makes me realize that it's all equally without the kind of significance we like to attach to it.

But beyond my not responding to the period ephemera of American Graffiti, I don't really quite believe in it. As it happens, Mel's Drive-In, where much of the film was photographed, is not far from where I live, and, in the several times I've passed it since I've seen the film, I've been aware that, from its appearance and that of its patrons alone (excluding only the presence of late-model automobiles), one might not be sure whether one were seeing it in the 70's or the 50's. Surely there must have been something in the summer of 1962 besides d.a.'s and drag races, something which didn't scream “1962!” at you.¹ Though I'm susceptible to it, unadulterated nostalgia, at least nostalgia for unworthy objects, seems to me fundamentally an enervating half-emotion, and I soon found cloying, even sickening, the way this film milked it; there was something somehow offensive to my hitherto dormant puritan sensibilities in seeing the lavish expenditure of this film's skill and talent on the meticulous recreation of such things as a 60's sock hop. And as the implausibilities of plot began to proliferate (would the cute dumb blonde really have attached herself to the homely jerk as the film has her doing, or the hot-rodder had such difficulty in dumping the underage girl who attaches herself to him, or the owner of a borrowed car be so unperturbed about its being stolen, etc., etc.?), the effect was really rather like that of Summer of '42, watching which one had an image of the staff of the art department laboring like Michelan-gelos to produce Fels Naphtha boxes while everything else—all essential verisimilitude—was going awry.

This first reaction gradually gave way to another as it became apparent, if for no other reason than that the film was simply too intelligent merely to be hustling nostalgia, however ironically, that something else must be impelling it. And, for a while, I thought I began to discern in the artful choreography of its characters' apparently aimless comings and goings something of what Susan Sontag may have had in mind when she spoke of works in which “the ‘content’ has . . . come to play a purely formal role,” and even to be reminded of such films as The Round-Up and The Red and the White by the extraordinary Hungarian director, Miklos Jancso, in which what seemed at times to be a purely formal exercise in the grouping and regrouping of characters for rhythmic, textural, and decorative effects eventually took on a distinctive meaning of its own.

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But the hope that American Graffiti might be anything so audacious also proved short-lived. If, at its best, the film does suggest some of Jancso's rhythmic and textural richness, one nevertheless sees before long that all the work's narrative strands, however freely they've been woven, are going to be gathered, and in the most conventional of fashions. And so each plot line issues in its predictable dénouement: the clean-cut class president finds he cannot bring himself to leave his cheerleader girl friend, and decides not to go away to college; the dumb blonde has a good time with the jerk, and promises to see him again; the swaggering king of the drag strip is revealed to be a sentimental softy, and realizes his racing days are numbered; and the protagonist, torn between his ambivalent attitudes about leaving his home town to go away to college, opts finally for the great world outside, though this last, and main, story is left somewhat confused by the conflicting symbols around which it is organized—Wolfman Jack, the mythically hip disc jockey who is reputed to broadcast from Mexico but turns out to be only a very uncharismatic man stuck in the same provincial town as the rest of the characters, and a mysterious blonde in a white Thunder-bird who cruises the town and seems to hold out the promise of infinite romance. (The Wolfman Jack material is further muddied by the fact that the real Wolfman Jack, who plays himself, did broadcast from over the border in Mexico, beaming a signal so powerful it was illegal by FCC regulations, and actually was something of a mythic figure if only on the scale of the puny myths of rock culture.)

As if the plot strands weren't thus sufficiently tied up, the film concludes with end-titles, infusing all that has gone before with a lot of unearned and phony poignancy as it reveals how each of the characters ended up years later: the class president who didn't leave town, an insurance salesman; the jerk (who's been as broadly cartooned as “Jughead” in Archie comics) killed in Vietnam; the drag racer run down by a drunk driver; the protagonist living in Canada, having become a writer. (This last, while it seems in no necessary way to emerge from the character that the film has depicted, does at least somewhat justify in retrospect the curiously detached air of wry amusement with which Richard Dreyfuss, who's so explosive a Baby Face Nelson in Dillinger, plays him.) Indeed, to judge from recent specimens in such films as The French Connection, Dillinger, etc., I suspect that end titles threaten to become to the 70's what freeze frames were in the 60's: the new cliché ending, affording film-makers an opportunity to assert profundities they've been unable otherwise to communicate, and, with this, providing as ingenious a shortcut to artistic creation as any that man has devised since the advent of painting by numbers.

So finally American Graffiti turns out to be both something less adventurous than that abstract balletic spectacle I thought I caught glimpses of, and of less dramatic impact than such a more conventional work as The Last Picture Show. And yet there are things in American Graffiti that are impressive; it is richly textured, and fluently cut, and visually handsome. (The photography, which was supervised by Haskell Wexler, seems to bathe the entire film in the pinkish glow of head-lights, street lights, and neon.) These were the qualities also of director George Lucas's first feature film, THX 1138, if brought here, in his second, to a higher degree; but both films, for all their technical proficiency, seem to me exercises, warmups for work which may yet come. And both films seem to me basically empty, the films of a director working in a dramatic medium whose purely technical skills as a film-maker are developed beyond any gifts he's yet revealed as a, dramatist. If richness of texture alone were enough to make a great film, American Graffiti might be the masterpiece some of its enthusiasts are claiming it to be. As it is, Lucas seems to me a director of formidable technique still very much in search of a first work of more than merely technical distinction.

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“Of course, I've nothing against adultery; some of my best friends are adulterers,” one may soon find oneself saying of yet another oppressed minority demanding its due. Times have changed; one needs to be broadminded. And the movies, where the wages of fooling around were once likely to prove fatal, have done their best to keep up, their changing scruples reflected in one recent movie's title: I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband. Or as George Segal remarks to Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class, one of two recent films in which he portrays a participant in an extramarital affair, “I've never been unfaithful to my wife [while we're] in the same city.”

In the other of these films, Blume in Love, Segal's philandering does have serious consequences: not death, but divorce (or to put it precisely in California legal parlance, “dissolution of marriage”). This is serious not because of divorce itself—like adultery, divorce has long since been divested of dramatic shock in our movies as in our culture—but because Stephen Blume, the character Segal plays, loves his wife, Nina, or at least thinks he does. In any case, he's obsessed with winning her back, and his efforts to do so constitute the film's story.

Blume is, in fact, an affluent divorce lawyer in Los Angeles, a locale in which the film's writer-director, Paul Mazursky, has specialized to the point of its being his subject. Mazursky's two earlier films as a director were Alex in Wonderland and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, both written in collaboration with Larry Tucker, with whom he had previously collaborated on the script of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas for another director. (Before entering films, the two had been involved with the Second City improvisational theater company.) There's an echo in Blume in Love of the scene in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas in which two men sit in an outdoor cafe, and one of them anguishedly asks, “What do they want from me?” as they watch the endless numbers of long-haired, mini-skirted girls stroll past, a scene which memorably captured the bewilderment and frustration of those the so-called “sexual revolution” had passed by. The only explicit explanation we are given for Blume's infidelity (which, at the time his wife catches him, consists of a single afternoon home early from the office with his lush black secretary) is his exclamation to his law partner that: “. . . you see it there, everywhere . . . no brassieres. . . .”

Fragmentary as this may be, it's at least more of an explanation than we're given for Nina's bitterly intransigent refusal of any reconciliation, and one searches the glimpses that we see in flash-back of their six-year marriage (ended before the film begins) for some fuller understanding which doesn't really come. Facts are there, but somehow don't add up. Their meeting at a benefit dance for the striking Delano farm workers. First and second honeymoons in Venice. He at his job, and she at hers as a worker for the Venice (California) Department of Welfare. Regular sessions (at least by her) on the couch. Some dabbling in such California-isms as encounter groups and yoga. His sarcasm after their attendance at a class in the latter in fact occasions what is probably the most fully articulated expression of the anger which one senses seething within her, and which his infidelity seems more to “legitimize” than to provoke. He's “always putting people down,” she berates him; they have “everything anybody could want,” and still they're “both miserable.” When he protests he's not miserable, she belligerently declares, “We're not committed!” “I don't need a guilt trip about money on top of everything else!” he tells her. “You're full of shit, just like the rest of America!” she replies.

Cut loose from the moorings of their marriage, the two drift into new liaisons (he with Arlene, a divorcee friend of theirs, she with Elmo, an unemployed hippie musician whom she meets when he applies for welfare) across a Los Angeles setting, filled with unmoored people, which Mazursky explores with an attentiveness to cultural forms approaching that of an ethnographer investigating some hitherto undiscovered society. It's a society in which all communication is colored by the jargon of the “human-potential” movement. Blume and Arlene openly discuss their “using” each other, and she remarks of his ex-wife, “She's the only girl I know who doesn't have any ego hangups. She's very giving.” Nina, donning love-beads with her easygoing musician, tells Blume, “I want to be free and open and clear in all my relationships,” and, when he asks if she hates him, replies, “I don't have time for that,” even as she's obviously still choked by it. Elmo, the mellow, “together” musician with his “good vibes” is the model aspired to, but though Blume and Nina desperately try to sing along with him they are hopelessly mired in their “up-tight” feelings (at one point, she plays her guitar and sings “You've Got a Friend” at the very moment she's rejecting Blume's clumsy attempts at rapprochement). And permeating all is the omnipresent authority of the “shrink,” the guru-sphinx occasionally dispensing some pop wisdom but to be depended on mainly for the refrain of “We'll discuss it on Thursday.” Between sessions, the characters flit hopefully from one panacea to the next: singles bars, swinging, communes, etc. In this world, it's the parents who are drop-outs and runaways, their kids the ones who have to send them money.

And perhaps what's most remarkable about Mazursky's observation of that world is its freedom from malice or ridicule. These people may behave ridiculously, but they aren't ridiculed; we are too aware of their vulnerability for that. In part, this owes to the performances, but surely these, too, are partly attributable to Mazursky, given that Segal has never been better (one has only to compare his frenetic, mechanical work in A Touch of Class) and that scarcely a trace of the tremendously appealing personality Kris Kris-tofferson (playing Elmo) reveals here was visible in his two earlier films. (Much as he seemed miscast in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peckinpah must surely have been asleep at the wheel to have got so little out of him.) But though Susan Anspach as Nina, Marsha Mason as Arlene, and Shelley Winters as one of Blume's clients are also excellent, the film's generosity of feeling goes beyond performance to characterization. The portrait of a psychiatrist (played by an actual psychiatrist) in Bob & Carol fa Ted & Alice is probably as vitriolic as any that recent movies have given us, but the psychiatrist in Blume in Love, if not exactly evoked with affection, is nevertheless seen chiefly from the aspect of his pathetic helplessness. “Sometimes it doesn't help. Sometimes it helps,” he replies to Blume's doubts about the efficacy of psychotherapy; “Until we find something better, what else is there to do?” Working with the materials common to all his films, Mazursky has this time got more deeply into those materials than ever before; he's got all the way down to the pain.

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And yet, though Blume in Love is Mazursky's most assured and fleshed-out film by far, something vital is missing from it, something more important to the movie than the misfirings of its would-be aphoristic wit at the beginning, or its dramatically weak ending (a weakness the endings of all of Mazursky's films have shared) of Blume's and Nina's reconciliation. We believe in Blume's obsession with regaining his wife, but we don't understand it; the suggestions that he (and she) may need their emotional violence for his (and her) sexual satisfaction remain only suggestions. (After his divorce, Blume goes through an episode of impotence dramatically cured when he engages in sexual relations while the television is tuned to scenes of combat, and his reconciliation with Nina takes place only after he rapes her, and she becomes pregnant.) And though we believe in Nina's anger, we don't understand that either; if in fact it stems from a liberal's guilty conscience (as her outburst about America might suggest) or from a nascent feminism of which there are hints, then surely her return to their life together ought to be seen as a kind of defeat rather than the heartwarming hokum it seems here. And that reconciliation itself is something we neither understand nor believe in; and, despite the film's attempt to keep tongue in cheek as a nine-months' pregnant Nina waddles into Blume's arms across the Piazza San Marco while the orchestra plays the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, the result is as flagrant a serving of schmaltz as any we've had since Joan Crawford sacrificed herself for love of John Garfield while he fiddled the very same music in the 1947 Humoresque.

Or to bring the comparison up to date, it's as dishonest as George Segal ending his affair with Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class in the name of his wife and children, characters for whom, throughout the film, he's demonstrated no hint of fondness, if not actual distaste, and who are depicted as no more than lifeless icons of middle-class respectability. Of course, in A Touch of Class, which is just machine-tooled junk, this is only one dishonesty among many; long before its pious embrace of domesticity, the film has falsified the reality of the adulterous affair by glossing over such details as the apparent accessibility to Miss Jackson (who plays a divorcee with children) of instantaneously available, marathon baby-sitting, and the seeming ease with which, in stolen moments, the couple convert a slum apartment rented for their meetings into a House Beautiful showplace, In a way, compared with A Touch of Class, the lack of conviction in Blume in Love's ending could even be considered a form of honesty: the film's admission, despite its reluctance to say so, that, though it can believe in the sexual antagonism of Blume and Nina, it can't convincingly imagine the reality of their happy marriage, and perhaps even, by extension, of happy marriage itself. It seems to know (as we had better know) that, if we want to believe, and to continue to believe, in the viability of marriage, we're going to have to imagine something more compelling than moribund obligations, pregnancies, the Liebestod, and these films' other variations on string and chewing gum with which to hold our marriages together.

¹ I gather from those far more knowledgeable about the period than I that much of the film's music is, in fact, from an earlier period, the songs already “golden oldies” by the time in which the movie is set.