The Impala first appeared as a concept car in 1956 and had more in common with the sleek Corvette than the thunderingly huge cruiser it would become.
The Chevy Impala is a hell of a machine, one whose legacy is still felt today. The Impala turns the Toad into a self-styled Tiger. The Toad enacts all of the teenage boy’s fantasies in one night: he gets a cool car, scores some booze, gets in a fight, and goes home with the girl. The Toad reinvents himself behind the wheel of that car, charming Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark) into cruising with him for the evening. He rides around in his (properly cool) Vespa Scooter, but it’s not until Ron Howard’s (total jackass) Steve Bolander hands over the keys to his ’58 Impala that his night turns around. The Toad’s got a good heart, but he’s kind of nebbish and kind of a dweeb. No character in the movie embodies this desire to just go as much as Terry “The Toad” Fields (played by Charles Martin Smith). But on one night in 1962 the American car still represented freedom, even if it was just the freedom to drive around in circles. There were still some truly great cars, and there was a burgeoning resurgence of the great American muscle car, but the days of the rest of the world trying to keep up with Detroit were over.Ī decade before that, the end of America’s car culture was beginning to be felt. By 1973 America’s years of directing the course of the automobile industry had come to a close.
Seen purely through a gearhead’s perspective, American Graffiti is interesting because it is a movie that is nostalgic for a period in America’s car culture that is itself inherently nostalgic for a different time. And while that time may have come to a close in 1961, when Jaguar unveiled the iconic E-Type, the ripples of America’s car culture would continue to be felt for years. But there was a time when the greatest cars in the world were manufactured in America. The technology of Mercedes, the aesthetics of Ferrari and Land Rover, and the engineering of Porsche are what set the pace for the future of the automobile.
Today, car culture is defined by European manufacturers. Nothing has changed the way we live our daily lives on such a grand scale as the car, with the possible exception of the mobile phone. The automobile might be, if not the most important invention of the 20 th century, certainly the most affecting. It is a film about nostalgia, as much its pitfalls as its soaring heights. It is a film about romantic love, about fearing what it means while simultaneously longing desperately for it. George Lucas’ 1973 American Graffiti is a terrific film about that transition from adolescence to adulthood and what it means to define and redefine oneself.
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