Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point ~ Now this is a film of legend. The only way it could be seen when I was a kid was on late night Friday nights on local ABC affiliate channel 6. It was notorious to many teenaged boys in the pre-cable 1970s for having ever-so-quick topless scenes the censors forgot to clip.

Later in life when I managed a video store, it was one of those films like Disney's Song of the South and John Wayne's The High and the Mighty - it just wasn't available on video. If I had a dime for how many times I had to tell some disappointed customer one of those titles wasn't available... well, I'd have a whole buncha dimes. Vanishing Point from 1971 eventually came out, as did High and the Mighty (don't hold your breath for Song of the South) but in the meantime the film achieved a sort of cult status.

The premise is simple. Vietnam vet Kowalski has to deliver a car from Denver to San Francisco over the weekend. Already exhausted, he makes a bet he can get the car - a beautiful white 1970 Dodge Challenger - there the next day, in just fifteen hours. The race begins. Pursued by the police, and guided by the words of a blind disc-jockey Super Soul in Las Vegas, Kowalski becomes a folk hero as he makes the impossible run.

Now from the above, this might sound like a precursor to Smokey and the Bandit or any of the sillier car chase movies of the seventies, and they do owe a certain extent to Vanishing Point, but this is a spiritual journey. One could even say the weird almost-psychic connection Kowalski shares with Super Soul is supernatural. This movie is a lot more than it at first appears.

Barry Newman plays the at times inexplicable Kowalski, a man on the hero's journey across a short western expanse of Easy Rider America. His companion on the car radio, with whom he shares an empathic kinship is Super Soul, played with the youthful enthusiasm of a young Stevie Wonder crossed with an evangelist in the spirit is a pre-Blazing Saddles Cleavon Little. How these two escaped Oscar nods for this is a mystery.

Another mystery is the plot of the film itself. Why does Kowalski do the things he does? Why is he driving to what is eventually his death? Does he know? And what is the weird psychic connection between him and Super Soul? Is the entire film an allegory? An after-death flashback, a loop in Hell that Kowalski must somehow keep running? There are so many theories, and will probably continue to be.

No matter what you think happens in Vanishing Point, it has become a cult film, a legend. It has inspired so many, from the kids who drove Dodge Challengers in the 1970s because of it to Quentin Tarantino who honored it in Death Proof. It is probably one of the greatest car movies of all time, and worth seeing for the fortieth time or the first. Great soundtrack, great scenery, highly recommended.

RIP Karen Black

Earlier today I found out that actress Karen Black had passed away via a Tweet from my good friend Andy Burns, also editor-in-chief of Biff Bam Pop!. Another Tweeter's response was that he had no words. That's how I feel. We've lost one of the good ones, a legend of the genre. Karen Black died yesterday in Los Angeles from ampullary cancer at the age of 74.

When I said genre, I am of course talking about the horror genre. Karen Black probably most remembered film is one where she played a tour de force of four characters in Dan Curtis' TV movie of the week Trilogy of Terror. It was at the aforementioned Andy Burns' website, Biff Bam Pop!, that I talked about how that film still scares the crap outta me. You can read that here.

While it's true she made her share of horror films, notably Trilogy, and Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses among others, it's a fact she never stopped making movies. But of all the films Ms. Black has made, it is the movies of the 1970s that defne her. Hell, one could even say that Karen Black defined film in the 1970s. She changed the way women and sexuality were portrayed on the big screen.

Among her films are some of the best or at least most memorable of the decade, including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby, Capricorn One, In Praise of Older Women, Hitchcock's last movie Family Plot, and Robert Altman's Nashville. She also starred on stage and on television as well as film. She was a composer, screenwriter, producer, and author of children's books.

I met her once a few years back, at a Chiller convention near the Meadowlands. We were about to leave and I saw this seemingly crazy woman screaming at people to get her something or other. The men surrounding her scrambled. I realized it was Karen Black. She was holding court in the lobby of the hotel.

I was either brave or stupid, so I approached her and told her she was great in Easy Rider and Nashville, and that I loved her in Trilogy, even though she scared me to death in it. She was kind, and soft spoken, and thanked me, even shook my hand. Moments later she was barking at underlings again, but to me, and other fans who approached her she was an angel.

That's how I will remember Karen Black - a kind loving woman who adored her fans. Not the psychopath possessed by a Zuni fetish doll. And that's probably for the best. We've lost one of Hollywood's great actresses, and she will be missed.

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry ~ There was a time when I was a kid that I thought Peter Fonda was the coolest guy on Earth. He was in stuff like Race With the Devil and Futureworld and of course Easy Rider, so he could do no wrong. He was also in this charmer.

Until I saw Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry again recently I could remember very little about it. I remembered it starred Fonda, and Susan George, in the bizarre title roles, it was a car chase flick, and it was frequently one of channel 6's late night Friday movies - you know, the ones I wasn't supposed to be staying up watching - both because of the content, and because it was past my bedtime. Little else was retained by my memory.

Upon watching it again for the first time in almost maybe forty years, I am struck by how really bad it is. It may have been okay or mediocre for the time (1974), but let's just say the years have not been kind. Rather than an interesting time capsule like other seventies films I've watched recently, this is a creaky relic.

Loosely based on the novel "The Chase" (later known as "Pursuit") by Richard Unekis, one can easily see the influence of earlier films of the genre like Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, The French Connection, and even Bonnie and Clyde. The problem is that you can also see this film's own influence on the destruction and mocking of the genre later in the decade by stuff like Smokey and the Bandit, Eat My Dust, and The Blues Brothers. This is the beginning of the car chase movie becoming a joke, amusing or not.

This movie is so seventies, down to the theme song by Marjorie McCoy being used throughout as if choreographed by Quentin Tarantino, to the crazy fashions and ugly cars, to the endless shots of the scenic southwest. And the late Vic Morrow wonderfully eats up the screen as the obsessed pursuing cop. It's worth a look for the curious, but it's no masterpiece, but Peter Fonda is still cool.