More American Graffiti Reviews

This lame sequel to George Lucas' phenomenally successful AMERICAN GRAFFITI traces the lives of the main characters (with the conspicuous exception of the young man played by Richard Dreyfuss) from the end of the first film well into the 1960s. Directed not by Lucas, but by the pedestrian B.W.L. Norton (THREE FOR THE ROAD). Williams and Howard, now married, are swept up in the anti-war protest movement; LeMat tries to make it as a professional drag racer and woos attractive Swede Bjorn; Clark and Phillips have joined the flower-power scene in San Francisco and are traveling with a band led by Glenn. Smith and Hopkins, meanwhile, are overseas fighting in Vietnam. The idea here--that a close-knit group of smalltown teenagers were pulled in wildly disparate directions by the turbulent 60s--was much more eloquently expressed in the closing titles of Lucas' original. Norton's screenplay is predictable and the film suffers from its fragmented narrative. Some interest is provided by an unusual visual approach: the various segments employ separate film processes and aspect ratios in an attempt to supply visual analogues for the characters' situations. Watch for Harrison Ford in an unbilled cameo as a motorcycle cop.