- 27-year-old prodigy George Lucas debuted with THX 1138 in 1971- a remarkable achievement of sight and sound
- It is a bleak film, Orwellian—Empire Strikes Back is also gloomy but this is as cold (sort of like Lang or Kubrick) as Lucas would ever be.
- He served as his own editor- and it is a fantastic feat of montage. The crew surrounding Lucas is noteworthy as well. Lalo Schifrin did the score—I’m not sure how Lucas got the backing of Lalo Schifrin (Cool Hand Luke in 1967) as an unknown in 1971. Walter Murch is the co-writer and does the “sound montage”. Murch is a genius—he’d go on to win some Oscars and work on The Conversation and Apocalypse Now but the mastery is right here in 1971 before both of those collaborations with Coppola.
- The ASL (average shot length) is low—this is Eisenstein or 1990s Oliver Stone and the sound design to match Lucas’s rapid-fire images.
- Lucas’ story is minimal— he’s taking on religion and consumerism. In retrospect it seems highly suspect that Lucas has a film where the mantra of the evil system is “let us be thankful we have commerce”.
such excruciating detail in the visual/audio concoction.
- The two spherically shaped shaved heads and naked bodies of Robert Duvall and Maggie McOmie in front of a white backdrop—not totally different from Bergman’s connecting heads in Persona.
Another great frame of Duvall and Donald Pleasance this time against a white wall.
A flickering collage – operators on the phone, control room monitors are constantly used as bouncing off points from the central story.
Lucas often uses a harsh flared orange lighting scheme
- The film is really broken into thirds, and alas, it is only two-thirds of a brilliant movie. The opening is Lang’s Metropolis meets The Parallax View meets The Trial (needless to say this is one of the good sections!). There’s a fine assembly line wide frame shot. A long shot capturing a cross section of structures, angles and space.
Lucas seems to have an innate sense of framing and architecture at age 27
the dystopian assembly line
- The middle second submarines the film and keeps it from transcending to another echelon of cinema art. There is far too much just white on white in the prison—it washes and mutes out everything.. It is like a 25-minute long Mike Teevee section of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
- Lucas returns the film to greatness in the final third. This section is a chase—gorgeous tunnels like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).
from the film’s final act– part The Trial and part The Third Man
the final chase sequence almost makes you forget about that pretty poorly conceived middle section… if you are going to wow them though– wow them in the opening and the closing like Lucas has
Lucas ends on a high as well with the golden sun final image as the credits roll
- Again, this is colder than anything Lucas would ever make again—it is a downer—but there is genius here in spades and the amount of craft that must have been put into it is staggering- such excruciating detail in the visual/audio concoction.
- Duvall was not a big name in 1971 and this was not a big budget film- he’s fine here but I did spend some time thinking about who would have been better in the lead. He’s not the right age in 1971 but John Hurt would have been better—I thought of him because he’s so good in 1984 in a similar role. I think a younger Alec Guinness if you could have caught him between his lighter comedies and River Kwai. Duvall is the better overall actor historically, but I would have preferred Tom Courtenay in 1971. Perhaps it is because it is Orwellian that all of my ideas here are British!
Robert Duvall’s first significant lead. He had been in Altman’s MASH the year prior and supporting roles often in the 1960’s in films like To Kill and Mockingbird, Bullitt, and True Grit. The projection of his career would change dramatically the year after THX 1138– when The Godfather is released
- Highly Recommend/Must See border
George Lucas is 26-27 here, it’s his debut film and he already shows a far greater understanding of composition, framing, architecture, and mis-en-scene than 99.99% of veteran directors
The world of THX 1138 is a brutal, cold, Orwellian [https://imgur.com/a/4Ll2w5e] dystopia. To capture the brutal oppression and alienation, Lucas gives us dozens of frames [https://imgur.com/a/OugZpxX; https://imgur.com/a/ob2t1IY%5D that capture this feeling that would make even Antonioni proud (the first image in the second to last link in this paragraph looks like it’s from a sci-fi Red Desert)
Lucas at even this young of an age understands the possibilities of using ceilings and lighting as a form of mis-en-scene to paint and texture the film. [https://imgur.com/a/rflNP3A] (I now realize that the second screenshot in this collection is actually from the THX1138 student short film Lucas made a couple years prior to the full feature). This is a principle that Welles best understood, and some of these visuals, if in black and white, would look like it came straight out of The Trial
There are some bizarre ideas in here. Like a wall-less prison? A bar-less prison? The prison in this film is an infinite white void of seemingly nothingness… wat. [https://imgur.com/a/xwhoXwc] What about Duvall’s character confessing his sins to a robot Jesus lookalike thing?
The white void sequence does go on a little too long, but I think Lucas does a good enough job of shooting the sequence in a wide-enough array of different ways (birds-eye-view shots, a love-making sequence full of closeups, super-wide-shots of Duvall’s character lost in his environment, jet black-suited AI that contrasts heavily with the all-white environment as they round up the prisoners)to keep it fresh enough until we return back to the superior sequences
Hilarious little worldbuilding moment where the robots congratulate Duvall’s station on only losing 190 something members compared to another stations 240 something
A clever thing Lucas does in the edit is cross cut the thread with Duvall’s journey with the surveillance going on. It’s usually not implied that they are even directly watching him, it’s just a constant reminder to us of the surveillance state that he exists in
The commitment to its visual aesthetic is admirable. The overwhelming amount of white as the primary color and black as the secondary color color-scheme, the claustrophobic framing, the crushing and oppressive set design, the gorgeous dissolve edits, the continuous cross-editing between Duvall and the surveillance state, and the focus put on using ceilings and lighting as mis-en-scene is rigorously applied. It’s Kubrick level precision and obsessiveness
It’s a testament to this film that I haven’t even gotten to the chase at the end. Both the car chase and the tunnel chase are standouts, I cite The Trial above, and that influence is here, but so is The Third Man in that tunnel sequence [https://imgur.com/a/KkCr2Q7]
Alphaville influence in the content
Not something I’m going to spend much time on but there is some Persona in the love sequences between Duvall and the love interest character. Specifically with the blocking of faces. I thought this immediately. Lucas is clearly a major student of film. There is clear Welles, Antonioni, Bergman, Reed, Godard and Kubrick influence
Also, wow, this one of the best sound designs of the 70s (who would have guessed that the man behind Star Wars was capable of this?). I would put Lucas in a special class with his buddy Coppola (who produced this film!), Michael Mann, and Kubrick for directors who are the best sound engineers/conceptualizers
There really is no story here. And what we have on screen is bizarre. The 3.4/5 Letterboxd grading is not surprising. This is so unlike Lucas’ other, fun, blockbuster-creating adventure films. It feels like a completely different filmmaker. This one is an incredibly uncomfortable and odd feeling film thanks to Lucas’ formal and stylistic choices and avant-garde pacing and narrative structuring
While this does not have the narrative of Star Wars (few films do), the innovative miniature work (few films do), John Williams all-time score (few films do), or the engaging characters (few films do), this film is the film that best showcases Lucas’ compositional skills (excluding TESB for now) It’s a super lean 80 minute film and there are probably 50 wall art quality shots
Not even mentioned above are the futuristic dystopian assembly line visuals that could come straight off Kamino or the final sunset shot. Sunset finales are a very cliche thing but this is one of the best ones. It just looks really good but it’s also a precise form-breaking moment as the free world contrasts so starkly with the subterranean dystopian world. A hell of a way to end the film
Must-See/Masterpiece film with 1 viewing. One of the most impressively photographed films of the 1970s and one of the most rigorously formal
A mini-trend in Lucas’ limited work I noticed that’s in both here and TPM is these extended middle sections that are detached from what’s before and what’s after, almost serving and some sort of interludes. The infinite-void-prison in THX and the pod-race in TPM both make up 15-17 minutes of the actual run time of their respective films. Radical structure here. Lucas is always one to experiment with it, I have not seen American Grafitti but from what I’ve seen it is unanimously agreed to have essentially created a new narrative style. There is also some truly bizarre and scant-garde structuring to Attack of the Clones that I plan on exploring more the next time (hopefully soon) I see that film
Hey Drake! I think you are both overestimating the length of the white-out sequence in the middle (from the point where we are actually fully stuck in there until we get out appeared to be around 16 minutes with a quick look) and underestimating some of the visuals in that sequence. I get it, it can be redundant, but I think Lucas shoots it in a wide-enough array of different ways (birds-eye-view shots, a love-making sequence full of closeups, super-wide-shots of Duvall’s character lost in his environment, jet black-suited AI that contrasts heavily with the all-white environment as they round up the prisoners) that keeps it just fresh enough until we get right back to the better sections. I was heavily impressed with the visual design of this, I could go on and on about so many different things (The Trial-inspired set design, the brilliant use of ceilings and lighting as mis-en-scene (a la Welles again), the dogmatic color scheme) but I was maybe most impressed with how Lucas goes about visualizing the brutal oppression and alienation of the environment. It’s very Antonioni-like I think. And I think I did a good job rounding up some of the shots from the film that showcase this here: https://imgur.com/a/OugZpxX that first shot especially is like a sci-fi Red Desert with the framing and blur effect. Anyways, with that said I think the absolute floor for this film is a half-grade above this at a MS
Also how about Bowie for the Duvall role here?
@Matthew- Thank you for sharing- I’ll let others chime in here if they’d like
Since this page (I believe) came after the 1971 page (which had this as a R), this
would be the official rating (HR/MS) for THX, correct?
@Matthew- that’s correct- HR/MS- I do not go back and update the individual pages (like Lucas or 1971) until the next update
Didn’t you notice a similarity between Robert Duvall in THX 1138 and James Caan in Rollerball?Both are of course great in The Godfather. They are the lead in Rollerball and THX 1138. Both are early 1970’s sci-fi films. And even though both are fine in the lead you spent some time thinking about who would have been better in the lead.