Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Like Stanley Kubrick (see A Clockwork Orange, here), Hal Ashby favours painterly composition and as little noise and movement as possible. In Harold’s therapy sessions, patient and shrink sit on brown leather armchairs at either ends of the frame. The still, eye-level camera accentuates their distance from each other, the foolishness of the therapy ritual, and the fact that they are both talking to us rather than each other.

  All of which sets up the film’s highlight comedy scenes nicely. Once you’ve got a boy who likes staging impossibly real suicides meeting posh young women he has no intention of marrying, the jokes come kinda natural. In the first, a chubby student explains to Mom Chasen that she’s only doing agency dates as a dare, while, way in the background, through the window and into the garden, Harold is busy dousing himself with petrol and setting himself on fire. Except, like a magician, Harold walks into the drawing-room door just as the hapless girl spots what she thinks is his grotesque demise. Um . . . it’s the way I don’t tell ’em, honest. It’s very funny. And Cort even gets to give the camera an evil grin, before being pulled back into his reality by disapproving Mom.

  The main dark joke is that no one could actually survive these fake suicides. Harold floats face down in the pool without a breathing apparatus for far too long. He shoots himself with live rounds but just appears in the next scene. He really did set himself on fire and really couldn’t have escaped burning and got into the house without a hair out of place. It’s the child’s fantasy of death without pain or consequences, when you’re still of an age where mortality seems like something that only happens to old people.

  Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins don’t bother us with too much superfluous back-story. We don’t know where Harold’s father is, nor why the Chasens are so wealthy. We do learn that a school chemistry lab mishap saw Mom Chasen informed that Harold was dead, and that it was her dramatic reaction that has got him so addicted to trying to convince her that he’s died again. In other words, Harold is obsessed with how emotional people get over you when you snuff it, as opposed to actually seeing it through. Quite a nice metaphor for death’s starring role in public life in the ultra-violent early ’70s, as well as a boy’s neurotic need to be loved.

  What makes Harold And Maude so unusual and intriguing is its mix of subtle cinema techniques and brutally unsubtle themes. Maude represents life, Harold represents death. Age equals purpose and youth equals nihilism because Maude’s generation fought a necessary war – Maude turns out to be a Nazi concentration camp survivor – and Harold’s generation are fighting a useless and futile one, in Vietnam. He takes her to see a demolition while she takes him to see flowers blooming in a greenhouse. Maude’s authority-baiting antics are a fantasy of civil disobedience with no nasty consequences. The two maverick protagonists are ‘good’ because they are outside of conventional society, and the hated and buffoonish authority figures are not the middle classes nor mere ‘straights’, but the ruling elite: politicos, military, cops, priesthood, doctors. Maude teaches Harold to live by embracing death, and Harold ends the film ‘cured’ and playing a banjo and dancing and wearing bright clothes, in a trick ending involving a motor vehicle and a cliff that was cribbed by Franc Roddam for Quadrophenia (see here). These are classic ’60s hippy platitudes and could have been truly awful. But Ashby’s Buster Keaton-esque sense of humour and two effortlessly strange stars make the story add up to far more than the sum of its parts, even managing to rise above the ill-advised Cat Stevens songs, another early ’70s hangover from the success of The Graduate and its huge Simon And Garfunkel soundtrack.

  What Harold And Maude isn’t necessarily saying, in case you were wondering, is that unhappy 19-year-olds should seek out sexual relationships with 79-year-olds, or vice versa. Harold and Maude are symbols, and Cort and Gordon’s ability to breathe reality into them is what makes the entire movie hang together as some kind of love story, even if you neither know nor care about Vietnam-era counterculture, or are as horrified by the thought of gerontophilia as the movie’s amusingly bilious priest. The sex, incidentally, is off-screen, and its intimations are immaculately tasteful, and quaintly romantic.

  As far as influence on teen movies goes, the Harold And Maude effect is probably negligible. There’s some of Cort’s baleful zombie demeanour in Jake Gyllenhall’s turn in Donnie Darko (see here), maybe. A deadpan, comic sympathy for oddballs that Harold And Maude shares with Napoleon Dynamite (see here) and Lucas (see here), perhaps. But this cult cinephile favourite’s true legacy lies in all those gently quirky American ‘indie’ comedies: The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Sideways, all the Wes Anderson movies. Films that charm you rather than move you, but do leave you feeling that you probably take the small but necessary joys of life a little too much for granted, and wouldn’t the world be better if we were just a little more optimistic and appreciative of what we have. Which probably wasn’t entirely the effect that Ashby was after. But is, in the end, just about as much as you can expect from a hippy who liked Cat bloody Stevens. We’re just a little too cynical to see such lovable silliness as agitprop now.

  THAT’LL BE THE DAY

  1973

  Starring: David Essex, Ringo Starr, Rosemary Leach, Robert Lindsay

  Dir.: Claude Whatham

  Plot: The parallel birth of British rock’n’ roll and pretty boys who hated women.

  Key line: ‘Please sir . . . can I leave the womb?’

  I’ve just re-read the review I did of this sorely underrated film for Popcorn, my previous book about rock movies. It’s really good, if I do say so myself. So good, it leaves me with little else to say. But we believe in value here at Orion, so no cheating by just reprinting the Popcorn entry. Nope . . . that would be wrong. Wouldn’t it, Ian? Ian, my editor, says it would. He’s a stand-up guy. More’s the pity.

  So, for those few who have neither seen David Essex’s first starring role nor read my previous best-selling masterpiece, That’ll Be The Day is the first of two films about a London boy called Jim McLaine who becomes a rock star and loses it big time in a castle in Spain. The second film, Stardust, is mental and disturbing. But the first is a sort of grubby English twin to George Lucas’s game-changing teen odyssey American Graffiti (see here), which also came out in 1973 and dealt with a similar period in recent history, in this case, the late 1950s–early ’60s. That’ll Be The Day also shares obsessions with rock ’n’ roll and sex, a keenness to give kids the adult language and themes which we craved at the time, a soundtrack of ’50s classics and an interest in the rites of passage of young men. But American Graffiti won hearts and big box office moolah by insisting that life had been better before long hair, politics and songs that weren’t about girls came along and spoiled everything by, you know, challenging stuff. Being British and therefore both more realistic and pessimistic, the less feelgood and therefore far less successful That’ll Be The Day views pre-rock ’n’ roll life as a kind of grey, rain-soaked prison camp where even big cities behaved like small towns and The Kids were just waiting for The Beatles and The Pill to come along and turn monochrome to colour.

  Fair enough. So far, so liberal-progressive. Except that, according to screenwriter Ray Connolly, England wasn’t hell because of the post-war economy, or The Tories, or cultural repression, or music that was just too white and polite. Nope. England was shit because women were shit. It was all Mum’s fault. The bitch.

  Connolly’s tale begins with Bad Dad as a kind of mysterious renegade hero. Mr McLaine (James Booth) comes back from the war when Jim is a nipper, attempts to settle into a life of routine as a husband, father and shopkeeper, and can’t stand it, leaving the powerless Ma McLaine (Leach) to stare stoically into the middle-distance, lip a-quivering, in that passive-aggressive way that women have when men do things they don’t want them to. It’s like father, like son all the way for Jim from that point on, as he inherits Dad’s wanderlust and fondness for ruining women’s lives.

  Because women really are all mothers, wh
ores or victims, and often all three in Jim’s world. Within seconds we’re watching Jim, now a beautiful teenager who looks like David Essex, being mugged off by a couple of birds at the local café after school, mockingly taking him for Coke and jukebox money before two bigger boys come along and claim ownership, as big boys are wont to do. A few minutes after that, Mummy is sitting in the kitchen planning his future (passing his exams, going to Uni) with a jaunty disinterest in what poor Jim wants, dominating him and his granddad with brisk efficiency.

  So Jim’s only option is to escape women completely and pull a Dad. He runs away to Brighton and summer fun and freedom. There he is befriended by a real-life Beatle called Ringo, who is actually, for the purposes of this tale, a Teddy Boy called Mike. Mike guides him from deckchair attendant to barman to a dream job at the funfair, where the pair have nothing to do except fiddle the take and attempt to get laid.

  Jim’s coming of age is less the passing from innocence to experience, and more the transition from shy victim of money-grubbing bitches to studly conqueror of foolish sluts. He seduces the boss’s middle-aged wife and humiliates the homely Mike, whose boasts about sexual conquest are pure fraud. But things turn dark. As Jim moves from the friendship’s beta to alpha male, a queer undercurrent swirls around the pair; Mike becomes more intimidated and awestruck by Jim’s success with the birds and is beaten up by marauding Teds. And Jim rapes an under-age girl. The boy, without the civilising influence of Mother, has become a monster.

  Last straws are reached when his old school-friend Terry invites him to a dance at his college. While Jim has been living the vagabond life as a rock ’n’ roll roustabout, Terry has been studying and acquiring a duffle-coat and a beatnik beard, a penchant for trad jazz and a posh totty girlfriend. Jim tries to impress the college gals and hits his head on a class ceiling. They’re not impressed by his fairground life and they’re far too smart to fall for his lies about writing a novel. He leaves with his horny tail between his skinny legs, humiliated by more worldly women in identical fashion to his earlier experiences at café and fairground.

  Then Jim has a nasty tryst with a girl who has her crying baby in the same room while they are trying to shag. Trust a woman to introduce you to the horrors of the consequences of your actions. Chastened, he once again does a Dad. He returns home to Mum. He conforms, working in the family shop. He bumps into an old girlfriend (Jeanette, played by Rosalind Ayres), they get married, she gets pregnant. But just as the drab early ’60s threatens to become THE SWINGING SIXTIES!!!, the old wanderlust grabs a hold. He inevitably bails, leaving Jeanette holding the baby.

  He doesn’t have a plan, but a shop in the High Street solves that problem. In a final shot that filled me with so much excitement when I was ten that I swear it was crucially responsible for the years I spent being a failed pop star, Jim notices and stares in awe at his Saviour and destiny . . . an electric guitar, in all its phallic glory.

  Some morality is injected into this tale in the Stardust sequel; Jim does get his comeuppance eventually, but not before getting absolutely everything he wants, and more, and especially from women. But the reason why such a misogynist film has now been bigged up by me in two bleedin’ books is because . . . That’ll Be The Day is a great movie. And although, in gender enlightenment terms, it makes Porky’s look like Thelma And Louise, it carries a truth. That is, that adolescent boys react very badly to the sudden understanding of how much power Mother and various female objects of desire hold over us. If one reads a few books, comes to terms with parental rebellion, has some great experiences with great girls . . . just grows the fuck up, basically, then one stops hating women and unconsciously punishing them for all one’s shortcomings. If one doesn’t, one becomes a monster like Jim McLaine . . . and there’s plenty of those to go around, even in these more enlightened times.

  On top of this, That’ll Be The Day is a wonderfully well-made film. Strong performances from all the leads. Immaculate period recreation, not just in the look and sound of the film, but of how well it builds the tensions inherent in post-war England that heralded the coming of a new, youth-oriented culture with an entirely different moral outlook. A wicked, grubby, ribald script by Connolly, who certainly has a flair for misogynist jokes and creating a repressed world where sex is still something infused with homophobic anxiety and a kind of implied violence.

  And then there’s the director. Claude Whatham didn’t quite match the impact of George Lucas. Nobody lauded his directorial excellence on That’ll Be The Day, nor handed him a sci-fi empire to strike back with. He made a few terribly English and Earthbound mini-hits: All Creatures Great And Small, Swallows And Amazons, Buddy’s Song. But That’ll Be The Day is fabulous work, deftly evoking the period while managing to blend the vérité grime of work like A Taste Of Honey (see here) and Michael Caine’s breakthrough Alfie with something altogether pop and glam-rock.

  I love the film because it reminds me of my 1973, rather than my Mum’s 1959. Which, now I think about it, is very much in keeping with That’ll Be The Day’s attitude to mothers.

  AMERICAN GRAFFITI

  1973

  Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford

  Dir.: George Lucas

  Plot: The film that made youth into nostalgia.

  Key line: ‘Do you wanna end up like John? You just can’t stay 17 forever!’

  Although American Graffiti will never be awarded the seminal status of more celebrated movie-brat-era movies, it is, pound-for-pound, the most important and influential film of its time.

  First, it proved that a low-budget American film didn’t have to be either experimental art movie or exploitation trash. Mainstream audiences would now accept a lack of spectacle if they could relate to characters and setting. Second, it reinforced the notion that the creatives understood more about what punters wanted than control-freak executives. Lucas was coming off the flop arty sci-fi film THX 1138 and spent a couple of humiliating years trawling his script about cruising ’60s teens around Hollywood, only getting the green light when his friend Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, came on board as producer. Even then, Universal executive Ned Tanen hated Graffiti on sight, and Coppola had to fight tooth and nail to get the movie released. When it took an astonishing $55 million at the box office and became the most profitable film ever made, it helped give the New Hollywood auteurs enough rope to dominate the decade until hanging themselves with expensive commercial disasters like Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and William Friedkin’s The Sorceror.

  And third, and crucially, it contained the seeds of the death of the Easy Riders/Raging Bull aesthetic, proving that, even as Hollywood’s brats bombarded movie-goers with dark, violent themes, explicit sex, bad language and bitter critiques of Nixon’s America, what people really wanted was a new version of innocent fun and permission to feel nostalgic about pre-’60s American values. Lucas’s next good idea was this Buck Rogers-type space opera affair where the good guys were pretty and wore white, the bad guys were ugly and wore black, and aliens were just funny-looking aliens, not metaphors for queers or foreigners. People liked it so much they made Lucas into a corporation, and he and his similarly ambitious and nostalgic friend Steven Spielberg killed off their movie brat peers by making a spectacular kind of family cinema that dovetailed neatly with Reagan and Thatcher’s insistence that the ’60s had just been the children being naughty while the responsible adults had been away fighting the Commies.

  American Graffiti, for better or for worse, bequeathed the world an American blockbuster entertainment that has defined our cultural codes and expectations for the last 30-plus years and counting. Not bad for a film that cost $750,000 and took 28 days to shoot.

  The plot is barely a plot at all. It is 1962 in Modesto, California and two teenage boys, Curt (Dreyfuss) and Steve (Howard) are enjoying a last Saturday night with their friends John (Le Mat) and Toad (Smith) before they h
ead to college. This involves a high school dance, girl troubles, drive-in diners where the waitresses wear roller-skates, a constant soundtrack of ’50s rock ’n’ roll, and, mainly, cruising the cramped Modesto streets in gorgeous cars.

  Each has adventures that help them to learn and grow, defined by two parallel symbolic quests. While middle-class intellectual Curt searches for a perfect blonde beauty he’s never spoken to, driven by a vision of transcendent love, the older, working-class John searches for sex, driven by machismo, habit and an existential ‘circuit’ he’s been cruising around for years and will never escape.

  But it wouldn’t be an American ’70s film without an unhealthy dollop of misogyny. Steve begins the film as the nice guy off to college, wanting to explore his ’60s sexual freedom by suggesting to girlfriend Laurie (Williams, who joined Howard in the cast of monster hit TV show Happy Days, which was pretty much American Graffiti for children) that they both date other people while he’s away. He ends the film domesticated and tied to Modesto for life, the willing victim of Laurie’s manipulations of his macho jealousy. Obviously, when faced with a choice of heady sexual experimentation or hen-pecking some nerd into marrying her, no decent teen girl would pass up the opportunity to house train the potential stud and enter a partnership based on resentment and mutual sexual repression, now would they? Laurie is the film’s only deeply horrible character, dressed to look as plain as possible, constantly nagging Steve from a stereotypically female high moral ground, bullying him into staying through a mixture of guilt and convincing the guy that he’s a pathetic child without her. The movie brat directors’ obsession with women as sexual-maternal prison wardens even touched the monumentally nerdy Lucas, who maybe felt he needed to impress proper men’s men like Coppola and Dennis Hopper. Or, maybe, Lucas’s film is very good because it sees its own arguments from both sides, fixing Laurie as the representative of soul-sucking ’50s morality, reminding us that there were good reasons why the rock ’n’ roll years didn’t hang around for ever.