Word: graffitiing
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...AMERICAN GRAFFITI...
...safe distance of miles and years, a certain nostalgia began inching its way into memory like a balm. In recent years several entertainments have distilled that nostalgia-The Last Picture Show, for example, and the Broadway musical Grease. But none have had the vigor and precision of American Graffiti. This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period...
...Graffiti was shot in Techniscope, a wide-screen process that yields the authentic sandpaper grain of the AIP pictures, implying low budgets and quick takes. The vital difference is that Graffiti was photographed by Haskell Wexler, that most subtle and agile of cameramen. Most of the action takes place at night under harsh light and neon, a landscape that Wexler turns into extravagantly impressionistic honky-tonk images of glaring, insistent beauty...
...small California town in 1962-the proper, if not the chronological, end of the 1950s-Graffiti provides a series of vignettes of the last night of summer. On the following day two of the local boys (Richard Dreyfuss and Ronny Howard) are set to leave for college. Howard and his girl (Cindy Williams) are surrogates for AIP's Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, the straight-arrow guy and his girl, the latter a believer in early marriage and eternal obligation. Comic relief is provided by Charlie Martin Smith as the sad sack, and a glimpse into the classic cruising...
...time. Business pulled out of the community. Unemployment, which stood at 35% before the Watts riots, now hovers at 45%. The black student union died away (although the coach remained). Instead, the street gangs have become strong, and the five-year-old science building is now covered with graffiti. Says one: "Watts is my station/ Love is my vocation./ Heaven is my destination/ To hell with education...