American Graffiti

“The anthropologist side of me never went away and…the whole innocence of the ‘50s, the mating rituals of the ‘50s, the uniquely American mating ritual of meeting the opposite sex in cars was very fascinating to me…I saw the beginning of the ‘60s as a real transition in the culture in the way, because of the Vietnam War, and all the things we were going through and I wanted to make a movie about it.” – George Lucas

There is a fascinating push-pull friction going on in American Graffiti (1973) between George Lucas the anthropologist with the use of long lenses and takes observing his subjects and Lucas the autobiographer with his close-ups on the compelling dramatic moments of his characters going through events either he experienced or people he knew. The film is at times nostalgic for this bygone era and at other times chronicling it from a distance, which may explain why it has aged surprisingly well as a time capsule of that time period and of Lucas as an artist when he made it, before he would create a franchise empire that would overshadow everything else he has done.

The film follows four young men and the women in their lives on the last night of summer vacation in 1962. We are introduced to the first three in a long shot arriving in their respective vehicles at a local diner in Modesto, California. Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) is deciding whether or not to college on the east coast. Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) is also going off to school and can’t believe that his friend is having doubts, pointing out that this is finally their chance to escape their dead-end town and avoid ending up like John Milner (Paul Le Mat), the local drag racer that never grew up and has a reputation for having the fastest car. Terry “The Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith) is entrusted with Steve’s ’58 Chevy Impala while he’s away at school and spends the night trying to get laid.

Curt, Steve and his girlfriend Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams) start the night off by going to the freshman hop at their high school to remember all of “the good times” as Curt puts it, which sets John off: “I ain’t going off to some goddamn fancy college. I’m staying here right here! Having fun, as usual.” This hints at the trouble he won’t say but we know. He feels left behind while they go off to college. He wants things to stay the same; later complaining that rock ‘n’ roll has gone downhill since Buddy Holly died.

The characters soon go their separate ways and Lucas the anthropologist cuts to a montage of cars cruising up and down the main street of the town. This was a nightly ritual that began back in the 1950s and continued on into 1960s and beyond – teenagers would go riding in their cars making fun of each other, getting into trouble and picking each other up. We see John in his element for this is where he feels most comfortable. He’s the king of the strip. All the while, Lucas has music playing with famed radio disc jockey Wolfman Jack’s colorful banter between songs. The music acts as a Greek chorus, complimenting and commenting on what we are seeing.

The guys’ lives are complicated by the women they are either involved with or encounter over the course of the night. With John, it’s when he agrees to pick-up Carol Morrison (Mackenzie Phillips), a young girl and not a beautiful woman as he was led to believe. Curt spots a mysterious striking blonde woman (Suzanna Sommers) in a car mouthing what he believes are the words, “I love you,” and spends the rest of the film trying to find her. Steve and Laurie start off by agreeing to see other people while they’re away at college but that quickly goes south when they get into a fight at the dance. This tension flares and simmers over the course of the night. Finally, Terry picks up a girl named Debbie (Candy Clark) off the street and they go through a series of misadventures.

The split personalities of Lucas the documentarian and the autobiographer are most apparent early on during the depiction of the freshman sock hop that Curt, Steve and Laurie attend, which is much more interesting than the melodrama that erupts between the latter couple. Lucas is a depicting a ritual from a bygone era that he actually experienced, which gives the sequence an air of authenticity. Once again, Lucas’ documentarian side comes to the foreground as he meticulously recreates this dance right down to the band Herby and the Heartbeats (Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids) playing the music and the dance moves of the kids. Lucas the self-mythologizer takes over when we see Curt wandering the empty, darkened halls of the high school. He ends up talking to a teacher (Terry McGovern) chaperoning the dance and asking him about his college experience. He only lasted a semester before going home after deciding he wasn’t “the competitive type.” This only feeds into Curt’s doubts.

Of the four main characters Curt and John are the most interesting, even getting the film’s most poignant moments. Steve is your typical all-American class president type and Terry is a dweeb that just wants to get laid. Curt, in comparison, starts off with the dilemma of going to college or staying put, then becomes obsessed with a blonde woman in a car and this leads him to being shanghaied by local greaser gang The Pharaohs who force him to pull a series of pranks as a form of initiation. Richard Dreyfuss is charming and funny in the role, especially how he interacts with others, using humor to both deflect insults and keep himself out of trouble as we see with his misadventures with The Pharaohs.

Curt’s brief stint as a juvenile delinquent is both amusing and a bit harrowing as The Pharaohs put him in danger on two separate occasions but he is able to use his affable personality to get out of these sticky situations. Dreyfuss plays well off of Bo Hopkins’ genial yet menacing greaser. There’s always the implied threat of violence hanging over them but Curt manages to pull off the tasks he’s given and survive the night.

John starts off as a typical hot rodder interested only in cars and picking up women but the more time he spends with Carol his true character emerges. Initially, they have an antagonistic relationship, as he’s embarrassed to be seen with this young kid, afraid it will damage his reputation. She feels like no one likes her, not her older sister Judy who dumped her with John or this grease monkey who is trying to get rid of her. Mackenzie Phillips does an excellent job of showing that Carol is more than an annoying brat. She wants to hang out with the older kids and be taken seriously.

They take a walk through a junkyard and John points out a few cars and their histories, such as the people that died in them. He’s managed to avoid that fate so far and stay the fastest guy on the strip. It is a quiet, poignant moment between these two characters where they put their differences aside. Paul Le Mat is excellent in this scene as John lets his cool façade down for a few minutes and shows a vulnerable side to Carol. In their next scene together, he helps her terrorize a car of girls that threw a water balloon at her. It is an important bonding experience for them as it is no longer two of them sniping at each other but them working together against a common foe. Their night ends on a sweet note as he finally drops her off at her house and gives her a part from his car – a little memento of their night together. It means the world to her as she runs off into the house while he heads off into the night with a wry smile.

Curt’s payoff comes when, in a last ditch Hail Mary to get in touch with the mysterious blonde, he goes to the local radio station to get a dedication played in the hopes she’ll contact him. He meets the night D.J. who doesn’t claim to be the mythological Wolfman but promises to relay the dedication to the man. As Curt leaves the station he looks back and sees the D.J. adopt the Wolfman’s distinctive voice and smiles with the knowledge that few others have.

American Graffiti heads towards its exciting climactic showdown between John and Bob Falfa (played to cocky perfection by Harrison Ford), an unknown drag racer in a black ’55 Chevy One-Fifty Coupe who has been looking for him all night. It’s dawn when the two head out of town to race. John has been dreading this moment, as he knows Falfa’s car is faster than his, thanks to a brief encounter earlier that night, but the would-be challenger crashes his car. Terry gushes about John’s win and in a rare moment of candor among his friends, tells him that he would’ve lost. Terry won’t hear it and hypes him and his car. John goes along with it, snapping back into “character” as it were. After all, being the top hot rodder is all he has in life and he knows it. In that moment, he comes to terms with it.

One can’t stress the importance of music in this film enough. It is everywhere. The first thing we hear is a radio being tuned to a station with the characters listening to it or having it play in the background throughout the film with the legendary Wolfman Jack commenting occasionally between songs. Music is often used to establish a mood and take us back to the time period as evident early on when “Sixteen Candles” plays over a shot of cars parked at Mel’s Diner, or showing cars cruising up and down the main drag to “Runaway” by Del Shannon as Lucas the anthropologist observes these people in their natural habitat, chronicling their nightly rituals.

For all the nostalgia that this film evokes people often forget the darker elements that gradually appear towards the end as Laurie is almost killed in a car accident. Lucas delivers the most powerful, emotional gut punch at the end with an epilogue that bluntly states the death of one of the main characters and another MIA in Vietnam. In an incredible example of tonal whiplash, the Beach Boys’ cheery “All Summer Long” plays over the credits ending things on a bittersweet note.

With every passing year there are fewer people that can answer the American Graffiti poster’s tag line question, “Where were you in ’62?” Lucas takes us back to a more innocent time when John F. Kennedy was still President of the United States and before a series of political assassinations, coupled with the Vietnam War, divided the country. We have this knowledge and are aware that these characters are on the cusp of all of this happening but are currently blissfully unaware. The farther we get away from the year that the film is set and the less people still alive who can remember it, American Graffiti becomes less of a nostalgia piece and more of a snapshot of a certain time and place, capturing Lucas as a young man before his life became complicated with filmmaking and empire building.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

When it was announced that a movie featuring a young Han Solo was in the works, the Star Wars fanbase took to the Internet to complain, their collective outrage came on two fronts: the casting to Alden Ehrenreich as Han, the role originated and made iconic by Harrison Ford, and the very existence of this movie would ruin the mystique of the character. Much like the other non-saga Star Wars movie, Rogue One (2016), Solo (2018) had a well-documented troubled production with the original directors replaced midway through principal photography by Ron Howard.

While the movie garnered strong reviews, it underperformed at the box office – the lowest of any of the Star Wars movies, which led pundits to speculate that its poor performance was due to it being released too close to Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and people were sick of Star Wars movies (and yet Marvel doesn’t seem to have this problem). Was it merely a matter of timing, its thunder stolen by superhero movie juggernauts Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Deadpool 2 (2018) or were audiences simply not interested in a Han Solo movie that didn’t have Ford reprising the role? Ultimately, all of this is meaningless in the face of a much bigger question: is Solo any good?

We meet a young Han (Ehrenreich) struggling to survive on the dangerous streets of Corellia with his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). They live by their wits, scamming and scheming a way off this dead-end planet. All Han dreams about is being the best pilot in the galaxy but he has very few options except for the Empire. He enlists in the Imperial Navy and finds that he doesn’t take orders too well and this lands him trouble. It also puts him in contact with two people who will be the important figures in his development as an outlaw – Chewbacca the Wookie (Joonas Suotamo), a prisoner of the Empire, and Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), a veteran criminal who becomes a mentor to Han, schooling him on how to be an outlaw. They introduce the young man to an exciting and dangerous world populated by colorful characters, none of whom he can trust.

Director Ron Howard wastes no time jumping right into it as Han and Qi’ra try to escape local gangsters via an exciting hover vehicle chase that shows off not just his piloting skills but also his willingness to take chances and press his luck. That being said, Solo starts off a little awkwardly with Han and Qi’ra’s downtrodden street urchin beginnings coming off as Charles Dickens by way of Blade Runner (1982). It isn’t all that interesting but from a story point-of-view I understand its purpose. It establishes the unbreakable bond between them. They grew up on the streets together and learned how to survive by sheer cunning and wits. It also establishes Han’s legendary lousy negotiating skills. Perhaps the movie should’ve started in medias res with Han and Qi’ra on the run from Lady Proxima’s goons. It would’ve been a bolder move to just drop us right in it and establish Han’s formidable piloting skills. In addition, getting separated at the Imperial checkpoints is an excellent way of showing how close they are and how painful it is for them to be torn apart (Han giving Qi’ra his lucky dice is a nice touch) by the Empire. Although, the moment where we learn how Han got his surname is clumsy and unnecessary as it awkwardly references The Godfather Part II (1974). I do like how this scene ends – with Han alone and afraid, which is a scenario we rarely see him in.

Solo really gets going when we catch up with Han three years later fighting for the Empire and meets Chewie and Beckett. It is also a brief albeit fascinating look at the Empire from the P.O.V. of the foot soldier: they are cannon fodder in a dirty chaotic battlefield that Han is lucky to survive. As bonus to film buffs, there’s even a nice visual nod to Stanley Kubrick’s World War I film Paths of Glory (1957). Once free of the Empire and in the employ of Beckett, Han enters a bigger world and the movie opens up as well.

It doesn’t take long for Ehrenreich to slip effortlessly into the role and make it his own. He doesn’t really look like Ford and doesn’t try to imitate the actor either, but instead adopts a few choice mannerisms of the character. He captures Han’s swagger and smartass disregard for authority brilliantly and in a way that shows the beginnings of the man we see in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). In Solo, Han still trusts people and has a sense of wonder, which Ehrenreich conveys quite well when he witnesses his first jump to hyperspace aboard the Millennium Falcon as he finally realizes his dream to see the galaxy. The actor is playing Han at an age that we never saw Ford play the character. It isn’t like Ehrenreich is replacing Ford but instead playing Han at a young age much like River Phoenix played a young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).

When Han, Chewie and Beckett arrive on infamous crime boss Dryden Vos’ (Paul Bettany) “yacht,” Ehrenreich does some of his best work with low-key comedy as Han tries to follow Beckett’s advice only to quickly abandon it. He’s told to keep his eyes down and not look at anyone. For a few seconds he does and the actor’s slightly embarrassed look is amusing. This quickly gives way to a romantic vibe when he’s reunited with Qi’ra and Ehrenreich does an excellent job of showing the rush of emotions that play over Han’s face. This entire sequence shows Han clearly out of his depth and trying to convey a confident front. The humor comes from the brief moments where we get glimpses of cracks in this façade.

Han even comes up with an unconventional solution to the coaxium they need to get for Dryden or risk facing his wrath. The young man is bullshitting his way through the plan as fast as he can. Fortunately, Beckett and Qi’ra catch on the help flesh it out. The best moment comes when Han proposes that he’ll fly the coaxium to a refinery before it destabilizes: “We’ve already got the pilot.” Ehrenreich points to himself and flashes Han’s trademark cocky smirk. This is the moment that Han starts to become the character we all know and love. The rest of the movie sees the actor build the character of Han bit by bit, like when he first boards the Falcon and begins to adopt Han’s trademark stance, even the way Ford would lean against a doorway. These are little gestures but they all go towards building the character up.

Another inspired bit of casting is Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, a smooth operator that knows how to invent his own luck, especially when it comes to games of chance. We meet him plying his trade: fleecing people of their money in a card game known as Sabacc. Glover exudes a cool sense of style and a confidence that is fun to watch, as is the amusing interplay with Han, most notably when they verbally spar while playing cards. Here are two arrogant smugglers facing off against each other for increasingly higher stakes. Glover is funny as Lando treats Han with whimsical condescension, much to Han’s chagrin, but his cockiness is put in check when Beckett steps in to negotiate his percentage of the take from an upcoming score.

Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan’s screenplay invokes A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) by paying homage to its roots – the old serials from a bygone era. Solo is structured as a series of cliffhangers as our heroes go from one sticky situation to another. The elder Kasdan slips right back into Han and Lando’s familiar cadences with ease, crafting a space western complete with chases, shoot-outs and showdowns.

The script also includes several character building moments between action sequences, like when Han and Chewie tell Beckett and his crew what they are going to do with their share from the loot in an upcoming score. It gives us insight into what motivates them. They’re not just mercenaries like Beckett and his crew. Han and Chewie have personal goals – the former wants to buy his own ship and go back for Qi’ra while the latter wants to free his people that have been enslaved by the Empire.

This is not to say that Solo doesn’t have its action-packed set pieces. The movie’s centerpiece is a thrilling train heist as Han, Chewie, Beckett and his crew attempt to steal a shipment of coaxium, a valuable commodity, from the Empire while also trying to fend off a gang of pirates led by the mysterious Enfys Nest (Erin Kellyman). There are plenty of tense moments as our heroes have to deal with multiple opponents whilst atop a very volatile and valuable shipment. This is the first time Han plays a pivotal role in something and he almost succeeds. He’s faced with a dilemma that forces him to take a risk or play it safe and he opts for the latter. It is an important lesson and from that point on he fully commits to being a risk-taking smuggler like Beckett who tells him, “You’re in this life for good.”

“You want to know how I’ve survived as long as I have? I trust no one. Assume every one will betray you and you will never be disappointed,” says Beckett to Han halfway through Solo. The young man replies, “Sounds like a lonely way to live.” The veteran outlaw simply tells him, “It’s the only way.” This exchange lays the down the foundation for the Han we first meet in A New Hope – a cynical smuggler that is out for only one person – himself. There’s an argument to be made that this movie is completely unnecessary and demystifies the iconic character. I understand this sentiment as I was initially resistant to this movie and the whole idea of it. Solo only sheds some light on the character of Han. There is still plenty of mystery to the character, like how does he go from this movie to what we see in A New Hope? What exactly went down between him and Jabba? Did he ever cross paths with Qi’ra again? What is Lando’s backstory? Or Chewie’s? We are only given small pieces of their story. There are so many adventures he and Chewie had between this movie and A New Hope that leaves plenty of gaps for us to use or imagination, especially since the disappointing box office results all but assures there won’t be a sequel anytime soon. Solo creates such a rich, textured world and introduces so many fascinating character that there are even more questions left unanswered about Han and his future.

I find myself enjoying these anthology movies more than the actual chapter movies. It might be that Rogue One and Solo don’t have to be too slavish to the style, tone and structure of the saga movies and this gives them the freedom to be their own thing. They also both explore the nooks and crannies of the Star Wars universe, showing us worlds we’ve never seen before and introducing us to all kinds of new characters we’ve never met. I have fond memories of reading the trilogy of Han Solo Adventures novels that came out in the late 1970s and they made me daydream about all kinds of adventures that Han and Chewie had pre-A New Hope. It was great to finally see a movie that realized those dreams and brought them so vividly to life.

Night Shift

The Ron Howard comedy Night Shift (1982) is significant for two reasons: it marked the first collaboration between the young director and producer Brian Grazer and it was the feature film debut of Michael Keaton. The first reason is important because it was the beginning of a partnership between Grazer and Howard that continues to this day and has resulted in many films of theirs garnering not only critical acclaim, but some serious box office results and even a few Academy Awards. The second reason saw the debut of a major talent in the form of Keaton who comes to life on-screen with killer comic timing and the ability to play brilliantly off his fellow actors. The end result is a sweet comedy about seedy subject matter that, at first glance, doesn’t seem like the right material for Howard, but armed with a fantastic screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, he makes it work.

It helps that initially Howard plays it straight by showing the mean streets of New York City as a pimp frantically tries to avoid two persistent enforcers (one of whom is played by Richard Belzer). The sequence ends with the two thugs throwing him out a window while tied to a chair. He plummets in agonizingly slow motion only to crash through a basketball hoop down below. Queue the catchy theme song performed by Quarterflash – written by none other than Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. It plays over the opening credits as the camera follows a city morgue car driving through the streets at night, which sets a funky kind of vibe to offset what just came before.

Mild-mannered Charles Lumley III (Henry Winkler) works at the City Morgue where one night he meets Belinda (Shelley Long), a prostitute who comes in to identify the body of her pimp that took the swan dive in the film’s prologue. Charles feebly tries to protest being switched over to the night shift despite his six years on the job in favor of his superior’s dimwitted nephew (“That Barney Rubble – what an actor!”). To make matters worse, he has to break in a new co-worker – Billy “Blaze” Blazejowski (Michael Keaton) who comes bounding into the City Morgue office full of energy, his Walkman blasting “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while he rattles off all sorts of questions at Charles, At one point, he picks up a framed picture of Charles’ fiancée and asks, “Hey, Chuck, who’s this? The wife? to which he replies, “Fiancée.” Without missing a beat, Billy says, “Nice frame.”

After Charles discovers Belinda beaten up in the elevator of the apartment building they both live in, the two neighbors get to talking and she laments at the loss of her pimp. It has made life for her and her girlfriends tough because they have no one to protect them from their clients. Charles tells Billy who comes up with the idea that they become pimps or “love brokers” as he puts it. Charles is understandably skeptical – it could be yet another of Billy’s scatterbrained ideas, but is swayed by Belinda’s charm as they become close friends over breakfast every morning. Armed with Charles’ financial acumen and Billy’s boundless enthusiasm and people skills, they become pimps and realize that they are quite good at it, but soon run afoul of the guys that took out Belinda’s previous pimp.

In his personal life, Charles is engaged to a woman that clearly controls their relationship as evident in a scene that sees Henry Winkler channeling a nebbish Woody Allen in what would’ve been a pretty good audition tape for one of his films. Charles comes home every day and narrowly avoids being mauled by a neighbor’s dog that seems to roam the hallways of the apartment building unsupervised. Basically, he’s a doormat who lets every one in his life walk all over him and doesn’t seem to mind all that much. He’s resigned himself to this lot in life.

Known at the time for playing the cool Arthur Fonzarelli on the popular television sitcom Happy Days, Winkler is cast wonderfully against type as a meek guy who is too busy making everyone else happy and not paying attention to his own needs. With his often nervous, mild tone of voice and button-down attire, Charles is miles away from the smooth-talking, black leather jacket-clad Fonz. After playing such an iconic role, I’m sure he wanted to avoid being typecast. Winkler does a nice job of showing Charles’ gradual transformation from pushover to someone that becomes more assertive in his personal and professional life with help from Billy and Belinda who give him a push at just the right moments.

Billy fancies himself an idea man and carries around a tape recorder because he gets so many ideas on a given day. (“I can’t control them. It’s like they come charging in. I can’t even fight ‘em even I wanted to.”) He comes up with some real doozies, like the solution to eliminating garbage on the streets of New York – edible paper. Or, putting mayonnaise in a tuna fish can, which only sparks an even better idea – feed mayo to live tuna (“Call Starkist.”). It’s a fantastic introduction, not only to the character of Billy, but also to Michael Keaton who arrives like a force of nature, bouncing off of Winkler’s reserved Charles and reacting to everything like an over-caffeinated kid.

Keaton is a revelation as Billy Blaze, playing a scene-stealing hustler who seems to coast through life on his wits. The actor nails his character in scenes like the one where Billy unconvincingly conveys Charles’ plan to Belinda and her friends. He starts off by hilariously breaking down the word “prostitution” in what amounts to a lot of nonsense. Fortunately, Charles steps in as the obvious brains of the operation by telling these women that they can make ten times what they make now, which definitely gets their attention. That being said, Billy isn’t all flash and bluster as demonstrated in a nice moment he has with Charles and Belinda where he reflects on his dysfunctional parents, which gives us a little insight into what motivates him.

The admittedly raunchy premise is tempered by the sweet romance that develops between Charles and Belinda. Unlike his fiancée, she doesn’t boss him around, but instead treats him as an equal. Before she became a household name with Cheers, Shelley Long was delightful as Belinda, the hooker with a heart of gold. She brings a nice amount of charm to the role and has good chemistry with Winkler.

Brian Grazer and Ron Howard first met in 1978, but nothing came of the encounter. Three years later, Grazer, ambitiously trying to make a name for himself as a producer, sought out Howard once again with an idea he had for a film. It was inspired by an actual news item about two guys that ran a prostitution ring out of a New York City morgue. Howard wasn’t immediately taken with the idea, but liked the notion that it would defy people’s expectations of him.

Howard had been trying to develop screenplays with two writers that had worked on Happy Days – Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. They took Grazer’s idea and wrote a script that the aspiring producer shopped around Hollywood. Most of the studio heads liked the premise, but weren’t crazy with the idea of letting “the kid from Happy Days” direct. However, Alan Ladd Jr. over at Warner Bros. decided to take a chance on Howard after George Lucas vouched for him.

When it came to casting Night Shift, Grazer and Howard pursued John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, but when they were unable to get them opted for Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler. At the time, Winkler had grown tired of playing a character like the Fonz and wanted to portray someone “more like myself.” He remembers that Mickey Rourke auditioned for the role of Billy Blaze and came in with a transistor radio tied with twine around his neck. Keaton was a stand-up comedian and made the decision to play Billy Blaze like someone who was hyperactive. The energy he conveyed in dailies freaked out studio executives so much that they pressured Howard to recast the role. However, the young director believed that Keaton was an “improvisational genius” and convinced executives that through editing his scenes the comedian would be a crowd-pleaser.

Night Shift enjoyed mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. Pauline Kael felt that it wasn’t “much of a movie but manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Keaton is a former improvisatory comedian whose timing is as good as his gags and who doesn’t miss a beat when he is sparring with Mr. Winkler.” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “This isn’t as snappily directed or as caustically conceived as the subsequent Risky Business, which has a similar theme, but it’s arguably just as sexy and almost as funny.” Finally, Variety wrote, “Though the plot line hardly sounds like a family film, this is probably the most sanitized treatment of pimps and prostitution audiences will ever see. None of this much matters, because director Ron Howard and screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, all TV veterans, are only bent on giving the audience a good time.”

Most of the film’s humor comes from the contrasting personalities of the straight-laced Charles and the wild and crazy Billy Blaze. Eventually, his constant chatter gets on Charles’ nerves and he tears into Billy in a rare moment where he loses his cool. It’s a rare moment of friction between the two and they quickly bond from it as a result. Howard picks the right moments to insert a bit of reality, be it the rough patch that Charles and Belinda hit in the last third of the film or the eventual reappearance of the thugs that killed Belinda’s pimp. These scenes threaten to upset the delicate balance that Howard manages to maintain for most of the film. These moments remind us what’s at stake for these characters and provides some much-needed conflict that Charles and Billy have to overcome.

Leave it to Ron Howard to make a feel-good comedy about prostitution, succeeding where the similarly-themed Doctor Detroit (1983) failed. This is due in large part to the winning appeal of Keaton and Winkler who make an excellent comedic team. Like most of Howard’s films, there’s a strong, humanistic core at the heart of Night Shift as Charles brings some compassion and decency to a profession not exactly known for such things. I suppose that’s what makes this film a bit of wish fulfillment, escapist fare to help us forget about our humdrum lives for a couple of hours. The film proved to be a modest hit for Grazer and Howard, leading to their next, even bigger commercial hit, Splash (1984).

SOURCES

Gray, Beverly. Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon …and Beyond. HarperCollins. 2003.

Heisler, Steve. “Random Roles: Henry Winkler.” A.V. Club. April 29, 2009.