The Cold War period of the mid-1970s was a time of paranoia, disillusionment and uncertainty. Just a few years earlier, President Richard Nixon had resigned following the Watergate scandal, and the United States was still struggling to learn the lessons of Vietnam. The movies offered a reflection of these doubts and fears: the various terrors of Jaws, Carrie and The Exorcist; the cynicism and corruption of All The President’s Men, The Godfather, Serpico and Dirty Harry. Science fiction utopias turned sour in Logan’s Run, Westworld, Soylent Green, Silent Running and Planet of the Apes.
And then, out of nowhere, in 1977 a new movie returned adults to childhood, and allowed audiences to simply thrill, wonder, believe and hope. Star Wars shocked George Lucas with its success. He’d battled from the deserts of Tunisia to the editing suites to complete this personal project that barely anyone believed in but himself—a new take on Flash Gordon, with aliens, ray guns, space ships and mystical energies. It was playing as the B-movie back-up at most movie theatres. Nobody thought this naive reworking of Saturday morning serials, with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns, would be a big hit; Lucas perhaps least of all. He only realised how successful the film was when he went out to lunch on the day of its release and saw the lines around the block, people queuing to see his film over and over again.
Star Wars, it seemed, gave the world what it had needed. It was a return to forgotten, simple pleasures, where bad guys were pantomime villains in black armour, where heroes were corny, idealistic farm-boys seeking adventure, where the princess wore white gowns and the wisecracking cowboy-figure came through in the end. Things got more complicated in the sequels of course, what with fathers and sisters, temptation and redemption complicating that black-and-white dynamic, but the first Star Wars was straightforward enough to end without words, with the good guys getting medals. It released adult audiences back into the world with an optimistic, childish excitement.
For children—and I was one of them—it was an instant, heady hit of cinema, a compilation of great moments from the history of movies. It was a collage of every film Lucas had seen and loved when he grew up. It was those Saturday-morning serials, sure, but it was also the classic Hollywood of The Searchers, the dogfights of Second World War movies, the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. It combined those with the more obscure flicks Lucas had studied at film school: the Jedi, the princess, the rogue and the squabbling comic relief are from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films; Robot Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was merged with the Tin Man to become C-3PO. Jean-Luc Godard’s Parisian future noir Alphaville, which had inspired Lucas’s earlier and bleakly dystopian THX 1138, is still visible in the Death Star scenes, and even the abstract, avant-garde animations Lucas enjoyed in the 1960s emerge in the special effects, in their play with colour and light.
Lucas’s triumph was to compile all these diverse influences into something new, and paradoxically, to make his fictional universe feel “used,” with battered technology and dusty clothes. Another of his great loves was documentary, and the scenes of Mos Eisley spaceport in particular have a hand-held, bustling feel, as if we’ve just dropped in on a world that will continue long after we left. It was a potent mix, detailed and, despite its director’s doubt, sure of itself. It invited us into its world, held us there and released us with a fanfare. And because of the unprecedented wave of merchandise that accompanied it, kids could go home and continue the adventures of Luke Skywalker, expanding the world through mini-action figures, scaled-down replicas of the spaceships and home-made models, glued together—much like the Millennium Falcon itself—out of junk. Many of those kids are now working in cinema. Some of them worked on The Force Awakens. Some of them, like me, became professors of film.
It’s easy now, years after the disappointment of Lucas’s prequels, with social media saturated with Star Wars—where t-shirts and toys based on the new movie have been on sale for months before its release, and trailers and spoilers are equally hard to avoid—to argue that the original magic has been lost. It’s understandable to feel cynical. But if I’m cautious now about The Force Awakens, it’s because I remember how it felt to run out of the cinema in 1977 pretending I was piloting an X-Wing; and whatever the sequels bring, they can’t rob me of that memory.
