Michael Schultz directed this deeply felt recollection of adolescent life on Chicago’s near North Side in 1964. Like American Graffiti, Cooley High deals with girl, school, and police troubles as a group of high school seniors prepare for post-high-school life.
This stark modern homage to Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo updates the action with a youth gang attacking a closing police station in a blighted ghetto neighborhood.
Featuring brilliant performances from Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
