Average and Below

John Derbyshire has written a feature-length essay on an old movie:

The second thing that struck me was that this is a movie about the left-hand half of the bell curve. Of the main characters, I would surmise that only Frank Jr. has an IQ over 100. A couple of the others — Bobby C, Doreen — come across as borderline retarded. All the rest are drawn from that big slab to the left of the mean: people with IQs of 80-something or 90-something. These are normal, unreflective working people who did not get much from their formal education, don't read books, and don't think in abstractions, or wish to.

He calls it "one of the dozen or so best movies of all time." Hint: came out thirty years ago, in 1977. One more hint: John Travolta.

No, really.