Vanishing Point

After seeing The Driver for the first time, I just had to check this one out again. I saw it for the first and last time when it was only a few years old, in the Embassy Theater on Market Street in San Francisco, where you could see three second-run feature films for not very much money and get a Depression-era spinning-wheel game called Ten-O-Win into the bargain!
I remember I was very impressed, but that’s always worrisome, isn’t it? Will it hold up, all these years later? Unlike most films I saw that many years ago, I remembered virtually everything about this movie … for the simple reason that there was not a lot to remember. I mean, most of it is a car moving very fast. There are short stops for odd adventures along the way, but mostly it’s about speed, both in the physical and chemical sense.
Good news: I liked it even more this time. Here it is, in all its simplistic glory:
Barry Newman is Kowalski,, a man who makes his living driving cars to places where their owners want them but are too lazy to drive themselves. (There were always stories in the ‘60s hippie communities of companies where you could drive a fancy car cross-country and actually get paid for it. I was dubious, but I guess they existed. Maybe still do.) He pulls into Denver, sleepless, and immediately wants another car to … anywhere. The car agency guy has a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 426 hemi engine (and doesn’t just reading that make your right foot twitch on an imaginary accelerator?), certainly one of the top four or five muscle cars of the muscle car era. He gets in, drives off with that monster engine growling, buys some speed from some bikers, and makes a bet that he can get the car to Frisco in 15 hours.
Now, in most movies this would be the important thing: the 15 hours. Like the infinitely inferior Cannonball Run or Smokey and the Bandit. Not here. When a motorcycle cop tries to stop him, he runs the cop into a ditch without apparent thought. And the chase is on. We get short flashbacks of him racing a dirt bike, wiping out in a stock car race, being a cop, smooching on the beach with his girlfriend. We gradually learn that he was thrown off the police force (we assume for stopping another cop from raping a girl), earned the Medal of Honor in Vietnam … and that his girlfriend was killed in a surfing accident. Just a few little tantalizing details, enough to know that this is probably a man who doesn’t really give a shit for anything anymore except driving. Real fast. He has no destination, and no life. Soon the cops from three states are after him. He shakes them off easily, simply because he’s a better driver and prepared to take any risk. There is no sense of urgency to beat the 15 hours (which is hardly mentioned again), or to do anything at all other than move! During the drive he is encouraged and abetted by a blind black radio DJ (Cleavon Little) who turns him into something of a folk hero of the wide, trackless desert. Along the way he meets the underrated and almost unknown (these days) Severn Darden, and the legendary Dean Jagger.
And that’s it. You just know it will end in tears, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how. There have been many deep philosophical assessments of this film over the years, existentialist, nihilist, you name it. It is cited as emblematic of the attitude of the time, and we do see several rather idealized hippies. I don’t really care to analyze it, I prefer just to sit back and appreciate the purity of it all. There are no horseshit messages, no goals (they remade it in 1997 with Kowalski driving to be with his wife, who was in labor, and I’m glad I didn’t see that one, as I’m afraid I’d have had to seek out the screenwriter and put a major hurtin’ on him). Some of the people he meets along the way, and the DJ, have “deep” things to say, mostly bumper sticker philosophy, and Kowalski seems totally uninterested in all of them. We learn just enough about him to give us the (probably erroneous) feeling that we understand him a little. The rest is up to us. It takes lot of guts to make a movie that way.
There are so many things to like here. The awesome, totally non-SFX stunt driving. The amazing composition of the shots, the beauty of the vast desert that makes a human so small and vulnerable. There are many shots from so far away that the Challenger is just a tiny white speck. You have to look for it.
Two addenda:
No review of Vanishing Point could be complete without a few words about the lovely Gilda Tester. (Who?) Well, she may be the only actress ever to appear in the credits of a movie as “Nude motorcycle rider.” This was a bit of a mind-stretching scene in 1971, the sight of this bronzed young lady riding through the desert completely naked. Hell, it’s mind-stretching today. She is entirely nude in all her scenes, and you don’t see that very often, either. No explanation is deemed to be necessary, and she seems totally without modesty. (Those crazy hippies!) She asks him if he wants to “have some fun.” (Free love!) He declines. (He just wants to drive!) She takes this without offense. I had to mention her because, aside from the fact that that image has been riding enjoyably around in my head (and, I suspect, the heads of a lot of other guys) for 37 years, there is an irony about her life. Her career as an actress was short, only three films, and I deduce from their descriptions that her chief asset was her lack of concern about exposing her body. I’d bet money there were nude scenes in the other two films. But the sweet irony is that she did have a career in Hollywood, right up to the present day … in the costume department! And the only costume I’ve ever seen her in was a pair of sandals!
Next: The DVD I rented had the American release on one side, and the British on the other. Not knowing the difference, I chose the American version. Then, because we found out that the difference was a scene left on the cutting room floor but restored for the Brits, which had an early role for the enchanting Charlotte Rampling, we looked at that one. (Her scene is very near the end of the film.) My advice: Don’t! Whoever cut it was right. She is a hitchhiker he picks up at night. She doesn’t talk much. He talks. He tells a little about himself. San Francisco, his destination, is “home.” Too much information! It spoils the mood of the film, and even worse, he seems to connect with her. At least, they kiss, and presumably more. In the morning, she’s gone. Hallucination of his drug-soaked brain? I don’t know or care, but I do know this scene does not belong in this movie. If you must see it to enjoy a scene of Rampling before she got really famous (it looks like she made her breakout film, The Damned, at about the same time), watch the American cut first, then skip to her scene on the flip side. If you don’t … don’t say I didn’t warn you. IMDb.com