Alas, director Richard C. Sarafian, who started his career directing television in the early ’60s, never reached the echelon occupied by those filmmakers, but his name will forever be associated with the cult status of Vanishing Point, which, like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), sought to personify the schisms in American culture, particularly the tensions between the counterculture and the establishment, along the rush of the open highway. Not just an extended car chase movie, Vanishing Point was part of the so-called American “Cinema of Unrest” as it sought to be a multilayered metaphor for not just the American condition, but for the nature of fate itself. Faddishly existential, it offers precious few explanations for its actions but insists that it be taken as something both meaningful and exhilarating, which is why youth audiences high on Sartre and their own alienation ate it up while mainstream critics couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

The story takes place over a two-day period, beginning with a sense of strange austerity, as the idyll of its golden, morning-sun-drenched images of peace and quiet are slowly invaded by wailing sirens, a low-flying helicopter, and finally two massive bulldozers that pull into position in the middle of a highway and drop their blades with a clanging metallic thud. All of this is intended to stop a man named Kowalski (Barry Newman), a professional driver who has been charged with driving a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T from Denver, Colorado, to Fresno, California. The film then flashes back two days earlier as Kowalski picks up the car, gets hopped on a speed to stay alert for the drive, and then takes off into the vast expanse of mountains and deserts between the two states. Who the car is for and why Kowalski is transporting it are never explained, nor is the reasoning behind why he must do it in 15 hours. The only motivation Kowalski seems to have is the need to drive and keep driving, as if he might cease to exist if he ever stopped moving. The film flashes back at various points to sketch in some details of Kowalski’s past as a racer and police officer who lost his girlfriend in a surfing accident, and we also learn through bits of dialogue that he was a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam. Otherwise, he is a cipher, an empty shell with tangled hair and long sideburns who exists to drive and nothing else.

Although the film is in constant motion, with Kowalski picking up constant pursuers in the form of state police and highway patrolmen, there are also moments of respite in which he encounters various denizens of the American outback, including a band of religious revivalists in the desert, a prospector (Dean Jagger) who collects snakes, a pair of gay highway bandits (Anthony James and Arthur Malet), and eventually a hippie outpost whose leader (Timothy Scott) has been seen as a kind of alternate-universe version of Peter Fonda’s Captain America. During his brief time with the hippies, Kowalski also crosses paths with a nude woman on a motorcycle (Gilda Texter, who ironically would go on to a long career as a Hollywood costume designer), which is perhaps the film’s most labored and dated symbol of pure freedom. The film also frequently cuts back to a radio booth helmed by a blind black DJ named Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who keeps tabs on Kowalski’s journey and feeds him information. Like the nude motorcycle rider, Super Soul is also a rather labored convention whose physical blindness does nothing to perturb his “all-seeing” shaman-like nature, which naturally must be taken down by a racist mob in a sequence of race-baiting violence.

If some of the cultural elements and zeitgeist symbolism in Vanishing Point have not worn particularly well over time, the film’s visuals have maintained their raw elegance and rugged beauty. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo, who was nominated for an Oscar three years later for his work on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), sets up gorgeous widescreen vistas that emphasize both the expansiveness of the sky and the rough-hewn beauty of the land. Kowalski’s white Dodge Challenge stands out against the stark terrain, which is frequently reduced to a near abstraction, especially once Kowalski is stranded in the bleached desolation of the badlands, his tires cutting dark, criss-crossing lines through the sand. While the film features a number of impressive stunts (it is a car chase movie, after all), what is ultimately memorable is the way Alonozo’s images transform Vanishing Point into a visual poem of light and dust infused with the relentless need for speed that drives Kowalski and the film itself straight into their fate without comment.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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