Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: Star Wars (1977)

The Drive-in Saturday Tuesday movie review is a seasonal feature in which I review movies I see at drive-in theaters. The name of the segment is taken from the Bowie song, though often the movies have no direct Bowie connection. Part of the fun is finding indirect Bowie connections, and a perhaps surprising number of these movies actually use a Bowie song in the soundtrack or are otherwise related to Bowie. But at the end of the day, this segment is a movie review!

Movie: Star Wars (1977)

Bowie Connections: While David Bowie never appeared in Star Wars, Mark Hamill tells a story about discovering a Bowie concert review hidden inside a 1976 set prop. Actress Dafne Keen claimed to have modeled her character in The Acolyte after him, and George Lucas produced Labyrinth. Why Lucas never had Ziggy Stardust appear in the background of some scene in any Star Wars movie is beyond me, though I added him to the Creature Cantina image in the above graphic.

More broadly, the movie in question is the original Star Wars, which I saw the year it was first released when I was eight. I wasn’t listening to Bowie yet, but I surely experienced this movie as a cultural phenomenon in 1977. 1977 was big for Bowie, too (he released both Low and “Heroes” that year), though he was less mainstream. On a personal level, then, both of these things became shaping parts of my life, though I was only tuned into one of them at the time.

Star Wars had an indirect, kind of repulsive force on Bowie, or, if not Bowie himself, space as a genre he inhabited. 2001, “Space Oddity,” Ziggy, and even the previous year’s Man Who Fell to Earth used space to suggest isolation, otherness, far-out edginess. Star Wars just about erased all that. Freddie Mercury sang, “I don’t like Star Wars” in “Bicycle Race.” Bowie never directly addressed the topic, but Star Wars made space hot, not cool, and Bowie avoided the genre for years after. This might have simply been coincidental— Bowie might have already moved on. Nonetheless, he kept his feet on the ground while Star Wars was flying high.

Experience: While this was not actually a drive-in, we saw Star Wars under the stars, as it were, with a group from Empire State University at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, AKA SPAC. The movie itself was actually not the main attraction. The reason this was happening at SPAC was that The Philadelphia Orchestra, which does a residency at SPAC each year, performed the soundtrack live as the film itself played on the big outdoor screen. We’ve done this type of thing before with Pirates of the Caribbean at the Chautauqua Institution and The Piano back at SPAC. For me, the difference is that I am so familiar with the Star Wars soundtrack, and the orchestra performed it so unerringly, that despite being right in front of them, I kinda forgot they were playing. This was quite an accomplishment—the main point of the event was achieved so perfectly that the effect, for me, was that I saw Star Wars at an outdoor amphitheater on a lovely summer night.

Movie Review: Star Wars has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it when I was eight years old. I remember having read about it beforehand, and my father recently reminded me that when he took me to see it, he knew nothing about it at all, but I knew all about it. My memory was different—I remember having heard of it and wanting to see it, but not on the day he took me. But upon seeing it, Star Wars changed my life. I might be conflating the part about not wanting to go with his taking me to see Moonraker two years later, but that’s a story for another post.

I have certainly seen Star Wars over and over again since 1977, before which Godzilla was where it was at. Earlier in the year, after seeing The Mandalorian and Grogu, I was kinda wanting to see the original Star Wars yet again. The SPAC show gave me a chance under the best possible conditions. The Mandalorian and Grogu was, while not the worst movie ever, a disappointment in part because it was underwhelming. Star Wars was an event in 1977. Though I was young, I remember everything became Star Wars that year, and I’m pretty sure that my memory isn’t too far off from reality. The movie was an event. It was in the theaters for months. At its height, people stood in long lines outside theaters to see it. For little boys, it became all of our favorite movie for years. Today, a Star Wars movie or show is little more than a blip. The difference has in part to do with how the original movie, while in many respects a composite of very familiar story archetypes, was also like absolutely nothing we had ever seen. That’s not the case at all with many of the more recent Star Wars movies and shows, which, rather than trying to tap into the primal, almost Jungian story templates that help humans make sense of the world, instead try to remind people of older Star Wars movies. Those older ones, especially the first two, gave what followed a loooot of slack, and although what came after ranged from good to bad, none managed to achieve anything like what the first two did.

But I don’t mean for this to be commentary on either the franchise as a whole or the second movie of the series, The Empire Strikes Back, which I have long thought managed to actually outdo the original. But that’s another story.

So, does Star Wars hold up? The answer is complicated because the Star Wars that we saw in 1977 has ceased to be. It isn’t even called Star Wars anymore. It is now called Episode IV: A New Hope. I’m gonna keep calling it Star Wars. The version we saw at SPAC seems to have been one of the post-1997 versions incorporating the Special Edition changes, including an enhanced, previously deleted scene featuring Jabba the Hutt and other CGI enhancements. Those alterations were cool in 1997, but detract from the movie today. The Jabba scene, for instance, has several problems, the most glaring of which is that it involves Han Solo saying to Jabba almost exactly what he had said to another character, Greedo, in a prior scene. One of the many strengths of Star Wars is that it doesn’t waste a lot of time or space. Almost everything in the movie advances the movie. This added scene doesn’t do that, but it also doesn’t ruin the movie and, if anything, underscores how well the rest works.

One of the people I was with mentioned during an intermission (which was needed for the orchestra) that the movie was somewhat slow-paced. That’s true, but I mention that not by way of criticism but more to underscore how it is actually quite economical. Although I haven’t seen it for years, I am reminded of movies like The Phantom Menace, which includes gratuitous race scenes. Even Return of the Jedi, or at least the enhanced version, includes a gratuitous singing scene. These types of things might have added little jolts of activity, but especially on return visits really just stretch out the movie. There’s very little you could remove from Star Wars without making it incoherent. This is actually a pretty rare achievement.

The special effects hold up remarkably well. They are less special than they were 49 years ago, but the distance between what they looked like in 1977 and what effects look like today is much shorter than the distance between how effects looked in, say, 1967 and how they looked in Star Wars. I’m thinking of the space scenes in You Only Live Twice—today they look silly. The special effects in Star Wars do not look silly.

All of these elements are parts of why the movie works, but I think now what seems the most important ingredient is the cast of characters. The characters themselves are engaging, and the actors are almost perfectly cast. Someone I was with mentioned that the acting was bad. I think he was specifically talking about Mark Hamill, and he has a point. But Mark Hamill’s acting was part of how he established Luke’s innocence. It actually might have been very good acting. Could you imagine someone else playing Luke, or even Hamill portraying him differently? Al Pacino was actually offered the role of Han Solo and turned it down. Actually, I’m not even ready to say that Al Pacino is a better actor than Harrison Ford, but on some level he tends to be thought of as a more serious actor than Ford. Is that what this movie needed? No. The cast could not have been better.

The guy who doesn’t get enough credit is Peter Cushing, the veteran British horror actor who brings his A-game as Governor Tarkin. Cushing has an important role to play in that he is the main bad guy with a face. Part of what makes Darth Vader and the stormtroopers menacing is that they are expressionless behind their masks. Cushing acts with his eyes, by nervously holding his hand to his lips, by being emotional. Vader, especially in this movie, is a cool customer. Think about the scene when Tarkin and Vader receive a report that the secret rebel base revealed by Princess Leia was, in fact, a decoy. Tarkin is mad—“She lied!” Vader is not: “I told you she would never consciously betray the rebellion.” What happens then is Tarkin orders Vader to terminate her—“immediately.”

That’s another thing that’s cool about Star Wars. Tarkin seems to be giving Vader orders. What, exactly, is their relationship? Who is the Emperor? What was that about the Clone Wars? What are all the other references that, in this movie, are intriguing because we have no clear idea, but in subsequent movies, shows, books, video games, comics, fan fiction, and every other imaginable form of artistic expression, had to be explored and explained in absolutely unnecessary detail until every hint of mystery was removed? Star Wars is full of mystery. That serves the whole of the movie, but it especially serves the character of Vader. Is he a knight? A government official? A kind of evil Merlin? There’s so little that we actually know about stuff that is explained (over-explained) in later movies that it’s hard to watch this with the same sense of wonder. I once got into an argument with someone about whether the famous Imperial March by John Williams was first used in Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back. It’s Empire, but it later became so associated with Vader that the person I was arguing with insisted it was there in the beginning. If I were advising someone who never saw any Star Wars movie, I would suggest starting with this one and DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF STARTING WITH EPISODE ONE. In fact, the only reason I’d hold back from suggesting that they also stop with this one is that Empire is so good. Actually, if you only saw Empire, without seeing any of the other movies, that would probably be even more mind-blowing. On its own, it is a story about the good guys losing.

But Empire was never meant to be seen by itself. It was always meant to be situated between Star Wars and what would become (the inferior) Return of the Jedi. That was even the case during the interim before Jedi. The reason the ending of Empire would be mind-blowing on its own is that it is so clearly a cliffhanger. That, in itself, is also cool, but—here’s the point—Star Wars works as intended entirely on its own. Yes, Vader escapes, allowing for a sequel, but if there never was a sequel, this one has a beginning, middle, and end, and the whole of it is entirely satisfying.

So, yes, Star Wars holds up. I could write on and on and on about Star Wars, but you get the point. It is a near-perfect movie.

Rating: Really? What do you think I’m going to say? Four light sabres! Next year, classic movies get no ratings!

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