Cinema: STAR WARS The Year's Best Movie

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Suffering seems to be part of Lucas' nature. It was not fun for him to put the fun into Star Wars. He made his first two movies on small budgets and with small casts. Star Wars employed 900 people and forced him to become what he loathes: a big-time Hollywood director. "I found the experience excruciatingly painful," he says, "and I've discovered what I knew all along: I am not a film director. I'm a film maker. A film director is somebody who directs people—large operations. I like to sit down behind a camera and shoot pretty pictures and then cut them together and watch the magic come as I combine images and tell stories." The director, he goes on, is like a general sitting in the war room and sending other men to battle. He calls the film maker a lieutenant who actually leads his patrol across enemy lines.

For all of his basset-hound gloom, Lucas is a romantic—an innocent romantic. That innocence and that feeling for romance are what make Star Wars so fresh, so much fun and, finally, so fantastic. Lucas believed everything he put on film, and somewhere under the celluloid, he is Luke Sky-walker—out to slay the dragon, rescue the princess and find the Holy Grail. Black is black, white is white, and good will conquer evil, at least in his screening room.

It is a simple moralism that many real science fiction fans may not buy, and in sci-fi terms Star Wars is strictly softcore. Lucas, a fan himself, has evoked images from some of the best-known writers in the field. Tatooine, for example, is much like the arid planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's famed Dune trilogy; that resemblance carries even to the skeleton of one of Herbert's giant sand snakes in the background of a Tatooine scene. The barroom sequence, with its remarkable array of extraterrestrial freaks, is reminiscent of scenes written by Robert Heinlein and Samuel Delaney. But as Lucas and Producer Kurtz quickly point out, Star Wars is not science fiction but space fantasy. "Space fantasy allows you more rein to say what you want to say," explains Kurtz. "So that's what we call it."

Star Wars will find itself competing with several other major movies for the attention of audiences this summer, almost all of them-with much bigger budgets. In the next couple of months, two blockbuster war movies, Mac Arthur and A Bridge Too Far (which cost almost three times as much as Lucas' film), will open with their own galaxies of stars—old-fashioned Hollywood stars. In addition, there will be underwater adventure in The Deep, straight suspense in The Sorcerer (William Friedkin's remake of that wonderful old French movie The Wages of Fear), and devilish terror in Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Despite the talent and the money arrayed against it, Star Wars has one clear advantage: it is simple, elemental, and therefore unique. It has a happy ending, a rarity these days. Princess Leia is saved, the Death Star is vaporized—oh, come on, you knew it all along—and Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Artoo Detoo and Threepio receive the gratitude of freedom lovers everywhere. For most audiences the only sadness in the climax is that the film ends and cannot go on and on and on. It is surely one of the swiftest two hours on celluloid.