Because George Lucas hasn't directed a movie since Star Wars, it's often easy to forget that there was a time when Lucas wasn't concerned with becoming the next Walt Disney. After Star Wars' success made him wealthy, Lucas abandoned directing to concentrate on producing crowd-pleasing blockbusters like the old-fashioned, escapist Indiana Jones movies — films that Pat Robertson can take his family to see. But 26 years ago, Lucas was a starving filmmaker who made small-scale films (that are actually superior to many of his later overbudgeted, empty blockbuster productions), like everyone else who was a part of the "film brat" circle of film-school-educated directors. (Besides Lucas, other "film brats" included Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese.)
THX 1138, a haunting, dark-humored and cautionary sci-fi tale, was a film Lucas wrote and directed for $700,000 during those starving-filmmaker days. Although it's not as accessible as the Star Wars trilogy, it deserves as much of a big-time reissue as those films recently got. It's Lucas' other sci-fi masterpiece, the one hardly anybody born after 1977 knows about. Released in 1971 and produced by Coppola, Lucas' homie, THX 1138 was a box-office flop. In recent years, Lucas' feature-length remake of his own experimental film-school short has gained a cyberpunk following and become popular on the midnight-movie circuit (last weekend, it played at the Santa Cruz Nine, which showed an old print that had more hair on it than Robin Williams' chest). But outside of the cyberpunk crowd, older Lucas fans and film critics, the dystopian drama of Robert Duvall's THX 1138 seeking his sexuality and freedom in an underground drone society of the future is not as well-remembered as the swashbuckling space-cowboy adventures of Luke, Han and Leia.
There are no cute robots or cuddly teddy-bear aliens in this film; the robots in THX 1138 are mechanical policemen who make LAPD beat cops look like altar boys. Unlike Star Wars, THX 1138 was very much a product of the early '70s, a period when directors challenged the Hollywood studio system by making adult pictures with antiheroic, unsympathetic protagonists, experimental narrative techniques and downbeat endings — films that would make Pat Robertson squirm in his sleep. Also, Lucas' movie was made during a time when sci-fi on celluloid wasn't defined solely by the disaster-flick pyrotechnics of present-day movies like the jingoistic Independence Day. Films like THX 1138 and 2001 were cerebral sci-fi movies that served as more than just eye candy (they also paved the way for flicks like Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys). If Star Wars reflected the kid in Lucas, the nightmarish THX 1138 was made by the paranoid adult within him.
The writing for THX 1138 isn't entirely original; the plot (a man rebels in a rigid, machine-run society where sex is illegal, and everyone is forced to take sedatives) borrows heavily from George Orwell's 1984. But the movie is visually stunning and astonishingly edited; the fast-cutting between film, security-camera videotape and shots of computer readouts evocatively conveys the nightmare of a society overwhelmed by technology. The movie has a wonderfully eerie ambient score by Lalo Schifrin (the genius behind the Mission: Impossible theme), and there are fine performances by Duvall, Maggie McOmie as THX's lover and Donald Pleasance as a fellow deviant.
But what I appreciate most about THX 1138 is its stark, cynical portrayal of racism, something sci-fi is often guilty of, as well as a subject too many sci-fi films either tend to ignore or depict very heavy-handedly. In THX's all-white world, the few blacks that exist are forced to entertain the citizens on television or are raised to think they're not human (a black character thinks he's a hologram). There's a memorable sequence in which THX channel-surfs in his cell, and the entertainment includes a naked African woman dancing (the 25th-century version of the Spice channel) and an Amos 'n' Andy-ish show that makes UPN look progressive. In THX 1138, Lucas even found time to comment on blacks in the media. Any old movie that had the balls to make a subversive, biting and right-on-target observation of race that's relevant to the state of race relations today deserves a high-profile, expensive reissue in my book.
THX 1138 is available at any video or laserdisc store.