March 29, 2009: Vanishing Point (1971)
This is one of exactly two movies my mother claims doesn’t exist. It’s a long story, but I think she’s not keen on car movies. Vanishing Point (1971) is an introspective story, very much a product of its time, about a man driving long distances through the US west, for no clear reason. He encounters people and challenges along the way, with lots of fans and lots of enemies, and that’s about it.
I was brought up in a Chrysler-focused family, so the white 1970 Dodge Challenger, which is as much a star of the film as its driver Kowalski (played by Barry Newman), has even greater significance to me personally, being an iconic car of my youth. Vanishing Point is often lumped in with more “typical” car chase movies, although I think of it as being much more existential and the car chase being a convenient “vehicle”, if you will, for taking our protagonist from one wild encounter to the next. Still, as it turns out there’s plenty of goofy chase footage with banjo-heavy bluegrass music accompaniment, more along the lines of what we expect from a Smokey and the Bandit film.
Kowalski, the driver with no first name, has taken it upon himself to drive from Denver to San Francisco in about a day and a half, evidently on a wager with his drug dealer with the stakes being his next bottle of uppers. He gets through his first night with no significant problems, but come daylight, he goes through some speed traps and starts to catch the attention of state troopers. He passes through state lines and manages to keep ahead of the cops that way for a while, but eventually has to leave the beaten path and take to the sanctuary of the desert. All the while, a DJ named Super Soul, who seems to have an uncanny knowledge of Kowalski’s situation and what he needs to hear, broadcasts from his run-down radio station in a dusty little town, helping out and pleading with Kowalski to get where he’s going, safe and sound. In flashbacks, we learn of Kowalski’s past – his lover who died, his past careers as a race car driver and a police officer – and in this UK cut of the film now available on DVD, he picks up a very young Charlotte Rampling, the hitchhiker who may not be who she appears to be.
Vanishing Point is a cult classic and a fascinating study of the culture of its time, but it’s not really a film which can be watched over and over again in quick succession. Things fall apart around the seams under closer scrutiny, but it’s well worth revisiting again through the years, a car chase movie with some actual depth to it.
Cult classic car chase craziness. Cool.
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