5 • Vanishing Point
By the time Universal released Two-Lane Blacktop in July 1971, Twentieth Century Fox’s film about a cross-country race against the clock had already come and gone. Vanishing Point, released in March of that year, shares with Hellman’s film the same existentialist youth-cult road movie milieu that was carved out by Easy Rider. Both films feature grimly determined, coolly aloof, uncommunicative young men flippantly committing themselves to long-haul death trips that are doomed to failure from the outset. They also share common iconography (fast cars, lonely gas stations, lonelier drivers) and landscapes (the unending scroll of North America’s highway system). Both films also failed initially at the box office, before eventually enjoying cult rehabilitation and canonical induction. Yet despite these similarities and shared points of origin, Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop could never be mistaken for one another, so starkly opposed are their narrative modes and formal workings. Where Hellman’s film deliberately subverted and undermined its narrative appeal to the youth-cult set, Vanishing Point is perhaps the most shamelessly commercial attempt to repackage and resell the Easy Rider formula. Richard C. Sarafian’s film codifies the iconography and motifs of the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle into a more concrete generic framework, emphasizing the thrills of its relentless high-speed car chases. While commercial success would ultimately elude Vanishing Point, the story of its production confounds conventional wisdom about the New Hollywood, pointing to parallel conceptions of auteurism and commodification that were at play in Hollywood in 1971.
Like Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point does not feature much of a plot on paper. The film begins in the small town of Cisco, California, where police are assembling a roadblock. This impenetrable barricade of interlocked bulldozer blades spans the width of the roadway, intended to halt the impending arrival of the subject of the police chase, professional driver Kowalski (Barry Newman). As Kowalski roars down the highway toward the roadblock, the film freeze-frames and flashes back two days to Denver, Colorado. Kowalski is returning a car to his employer and accepts a job to deliver a Dodge Challenger to San Francisco. Seemingly on a whim, Kowalski makes a bet with his drug dealer, Jake (Lee Weaver), that he can deliver the car within fifteen hours—a wager verging on geographical and temporal impossibility. Shortly after his departure, Kowalski tangles with motorcycle police (again, seemingly arbitrarily), instigating the police chase that forms the basis of the film. The remainder of the movie follows Kowalski’s attempts to evade the police. The chase is interrupted by occasional episodic encounters with other individuals on the road, usually when Kowalski has momentarily gained enough distance from his pursuers to permit such interaction with the people he meets along his way. Kowalski encounters a wandering desert hermit played by Dean Jagger; a snake-worshipping, gospel-singing religious cult; a newly married gay couple who attempt to rob him (and are depicted with a sneering homophobia that has not stood the test of time particularly well and is particularly incongruous coming in the wake of more nuanced depictions of homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy and The Boys in the Band [dir. William Friedkin, National General Pictures, 1970]); a long-haired hippie motorcyclist who looks like a long-lost castoff from Easy Rider; and a naked woman motorcyclist who, in another dated and flimsy characterization, instantly offers her sexual services to Kowalski upon their first meeting.1
These episodes are bookended by continuous sequences of car-chase carnage, as Kowalski races through police blockades and outruns a never-ending succession of pursuit cars. The film is also peppered with occasional flashbacks to Kowalski’s previous occupations, fleshing out something of a psychological backstory for the character and altering our understanding of the motivations behind his terminal death drive. We see Kowalski as motorcyclist and professional race driver, injured in a crash; Kowalski as police officer, preventing his superior’s attempt to rape a young woman; and Kowalski as surfer dropout in love, subsequently rendered catatonic by the death of his lover. Taken in sum, these flashbacks cast Kowalski as a broken man with tragedy in his past and a healthy distaste for authority, finding his life’s culmination in the destruction predestined from the first scene of the film.
Kowalski’s progress is monitored by a blind Nevadan small-town disc jockey called Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who uses his radio broadcast to speak directly to Kowalski, who is strangely able to pick up the station’s incredibly broad-wave frequency no matter how many miles he traverses. Super Soul’s impassioned coverage of Kowalski’s flight is soon embraced by his countercultural listening audience, and long-haired types flock to the radio station in solidarity. Unfortunately this swelling movement also catches the attention of local rednecks, who break their way into the radio station and attack the African American disc jockey. Super Soul is subsequently coerced into misleadingly guiding Kowalski into a roadblock. Kowalski initially evades the first roadblock with the help of the hippie motorcyclist he has befriended, but then deliberately returns, accelerating directly into the bulldozer-blade barricade seen at the onset of the film, his car exploding into a fireball. The film ends as fire crews extinguish the flaming wreck of the car and rubbernecking townsfolk assemble around the charred remains.
Production Origins
As with Rudy Wurlitzer’s (re)writing of Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point’s screenplay also has origins in a literary mind, being an early attempt at screenwriting by Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, better known by his nom de plume G. Caín. Infante loosely based his pseudonymous screenplay (written as Guillermo Cain) on two factual incidents: the career of a disgraced San Diego police officer and returned serviceman and the story of a police chase in California in which the target refused to stop at a roadblock and died in the ensuing collision.2
Like many other Hollywood filmmakers who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s (among them Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, and William Friedkin), Richard C. Sarafian bypassed the traditional ascent through studio ranks, instead working extensively in television before transitioning laterally to studio direction. Prior to Vanishing Point, Sarafian had early directorial credits on such shows as I Spy (NBC, 1966, 1968); Batman (ABC, 1966); The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1963); and the western serials Maverick (ABC, 1961), Lawman (ABC, 1961–1962), The Big Valley (ABC, 1965), The Wild Wild West (CBS, 1965), and Gunsmoke (CBS, 1965, 1967, 1968). Sarafian directed his debut feature Run Wild, Run Free (Columbia Pictures, 1969), having earlier turned down the Olympic ski drama Downhill Racer (Paramount, 1969), which was released later in the same year and starred Robert Redford and Gene Hackman under the direction of Michael Ritchie.3
Twentieth Century Fox president Richard D. “Dick” Zanuck, son of former Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck and actress Virginia Fox, took a personal interest in overseeing the production of Vanishing Point. In an auspicious instance of studio-decreed product placement, the presence of the white 1970 Dodge Challenger was contractually engineered by Zanuck with the Chrysler motor company, which supplied the vehicles for a fee of one dollar a day.4 In fact, according to Sarafian, the Dodge Challenger represented Zanuck’s “main interest” in the project.5 Yet this claim must be taken with a grain of salt, given Paul Zazarine’s warning that Vanishing Point is a film around which “numerous myths have developed.”6 This situation is compounded by the relative lack of writing about the film to date and the often-contradictory statements that arise from interviews with key collaborators.
For example, while Sarafian says that the Challenger was included as a result of a preordained deal between Zanuck and the car company, in a 1986 interview with Muscle Car Review magazine, Vanishing Point stunt coordinator Carey Loftin says that he personally selected the Challenger for the film due to the “quality of the torsion bar suspension and for its horsepower.”7 In the same interview, Loftin also states that the vehicle company supplied the production with five Challenger vehicles, whereas Sarafian places the number at eight in his DVD commentary. While this relatively minor discrepancy of figures can be attributed to the vagaries of memory wandering back over the decades, it nevertheless calls into question the veracity of other, more substantially conflicting statements made about Vanishing Point’s production.
In his director’s commentary on the US release of Vanishing Point on DVD, Sarafian displays genuine humility as he addresses his own admittedly rocky career in a candid light and appears to legitimately relish the opportunity to discuss Vanishing Point, saying, at one point: “I was so fortunate to have this experience, and being able to talk about it thirty years later is a treat. I’ve got tears in my eyes.”8 But Sarafian appears to be something of an exaggerator and raconteur as he recounts some anecdotes that frankly beggar belief, such as the tale of a prostitute called Misty whom “the crew had sort of saved from a local hook joint, and was traveling with the crew,” only to abscond with the only remaining Challenger, instigating a chase involving a police helicopter before the car was returned.9
Uncertainties aside, what is clear is that the vehicle company accommodatingly provided the Dodge Challengers to Twentieth Century Fox in a mutually beneficial cross-promotional venture. In this regard, Vanishing Point extends Easy Rider’s vehicular centrality into the commercial realm, as a film set in and around a single vehicle becomes tied, at the earliest stages of preproduction, to the promotion of the mechanical prowess and commodification of that particular vehicle. For Zanuck, and for Chrysler, Vanishing Point begins with the Challenger, as a desirable and readily identifiable point of cross-promotion. While both Easy Rider and The Graduate suggested merchandising pathways for tie-in soundtrack albums, from the earliest stages of its existence Vanishing Point’s fortunes were tied to its ability to sell Chrysler’s vehicle.
Like the thematically similar films that preceded and coincided with it, Vanishing Point adopted another lesson from Easy Rider, employing a similarly flexible, mobile mode of production and location shooting. Like Hopper, Sarafian fully utilized the advances in shooting technology that were becoming increasingly standardized in Hollywood in the early 1970s. Smaller, portable cameras and sound recorders and faster film stocks meant that smaller crews could be used and could venture beyond the confines of the studio. Vanishing Point employed only one studio location, for the police control room seen at the end of the film, as the authorities monitor Kowalski’s incursion into California. The remainder of the film was shot in real-world locations, following the actual geographical route taken by Kowalski in the film—a feature shared with both Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. The advantage of using such a small number of locations and limiting much of the action to exterior and interior shots of Kowalski’s car was that the production required minimal crew, although a more elaborate scale of production could barely have been permitted given the project’s $US1.3 million budget—still a significantly larger figure than the $US 850,000 bottom line for Two-Lane Blacktop. Sarafian puts the budgetary figure in context when he recounts that Vanishing Point was produced by Fox only a year after the studio had taken heavy hits from such elaborate mega-productions as Hello, Dolly! (dir. Gene Kelly, 1969, $US 25 million budget) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (dir. Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku, 1970, $US25 million budget), both of which make the conditions of Vanishing Point’s production look “almost like a hobby” by comparison.10 Vanishing Point’s production manager, Francisco Day, had just finished work on Patton (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, Twentieth Century Fox, 1970) and was shocked to find himself a member of Sarafian’s crew of “nineteen members, where everybody pitched in, and picked up a broom and swept the set.”11 Furthermore, the fact that Vanishing Point eschews the globetrotting theater of war of Tora! Tora! Tora! or the sweeping musical gestures of Hello, Dolly!, instead restricting its focus to Kowalski’s drive across North America, points to a reduction of scale that features in many New Hollywood films, even one as commercially minded and generically coherent as Vanishing Point, remembering that it is an aesthetic object primarily intended to sell a car.
As had happened with Two-Lane Blacktop, the small-scale, mobile mode of production employed by Sarafian resulted in a set of aesthetic characteristics that recur throughout a number of films of the period. The use of real-world locations lends a lived-in sense of authenticity; like Hellman’s film, the careful, pseudo-documentary eye that Sarafian and cinematographer John A. Alonzo turned toward their locations now give the film something of a time-capsule quality. Sarafian says that it was not unusual for the production to “travel sometimes as much as 400 miles in one day, onto a spot that I thought would be visually interesting,” a similar luxury to that enjoyed by Hellman in the wake of the post–Easy Rider production boom, working on location and out of reach of studio interference.12
Style, Form, and Action
The opening sequence of Vanishing Point employs many of the same stylistic characteristics that can be observed in Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Vanishing Point begins with a wide shot of an empty stretch of highway. A derelict-looking service station is regarded through a very slow panning and tracking movement. The yellow-and-red Shell sign is the only splash of color on the drab, detritus-strewn wasteland, and the panning movement gradually reveals a distant mountain range upon the horizon, as well as seemingly abandoned town buildings, before, finally, the camera comes to gaze directly down the highway. In the glare of morning light, the gentle flapping of a flag is the only on-screen movement until a police motorcycle appears from a distant point on the horizon and heads directly toward the camera. This shot evokes many of the hallmarks of the 1971 road movie: a manipulation of cinematic space and time that draws attention to both the conspicuous emptiness of the frame and the inexorable passage of real time, eventually disrupted by the incursion of the police motorcycle. Similar plays with duration and inactivity can be observed amid the stylistic self-consciousness and narrative misdirections of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Two-Lane Blacktop. As well as being something of a narrative non sequitur consistent with the generic obfuscation that abounds within the youth-cult road movie cycle, the shot that opens Vanishing Point also quickly establishes the film’s territory. The Shell service station, a beacon of urbanity conspicuously adrift in the unforgiving desert terrain, evokes the dislocation of city dweller Kowalski, a character whose very name, according to John Beck, is “likely to suggest an urban immigrant identity out of its element in the open spaces of the West.”13 The shabby and abandoned-looking houses foreshadow the desert-dwelling individuals Kowalski will come to rely on to traverse this alien environment.
The second shot of Sarafian’s film is a low-angle shot of two backlit earthmovers lumbering down the highway, leaving a trail of dust behind them that is disturbed by a speeding police motorcycle that races between the two bulldozers. Shot with a wide-angle lens that distorts the camera’s perspective, the shot is framed in such a way that asphalt fills the lower half of the frame, visible in such detail that individual pieces of gravel can be perceived. This unusual camera angle momentarily disorients the viewer, recalling the similar shot of a front-end loader at the start of Five Easy Pieces. Vanishing Point’s third shot is even more disorienting, as the film cuts to a weathered home, the road reflected in a window. It is only when the reflection of the earthmover moves across the window that its relevance to the preceding shot becomes clear, and even then the spatial relationship of the shots remains obscure.
Figures 5.2 and 5.3. The opening sequences of Vanishing Point and Five Easy Pieces both feature similar low-angle shots of earthmoving equipment.
The rest of the sequence continues in this vein, evoking a lyrical quality through expressive photography: an underexposed shot looks out through an abandoned shop front as a silhouette replete with cowboy hat stands in the window, backlit by the natural light as the bulldozers dustily make their way past. As do the New Orleans sequence of Easy Rider, the oilfield scenes of Five Easy Pieces, and the drag race meet in Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point’s opening sequence uses pseudo-documentary photography and montage, intercutting documentary-style handheld cutaways with close-ups of the bulldozers and appearances by the actual residents of the small town. The decision to shoot on location in Cisco, California, well on its way to becoming a ghost town, adds to the documentary/newsreel quality. According to Sarafian, his crew happened upon nearly derelict Cisco, which he describes as a “town that’s now vacant, or was vacant at that time, because the railroad was built about a mile or so away, and a super-highway alongside it.”14
What remains unclear throughout the opening sequence of Vanishing Point is precisely what is actually happening. This question is wryly acknowledged by the first line of dialogue in the film: “Wonder what’s going on here? Here comes CBS news, must be important.” These languorous moments of inaction and narrative misdirection, evocative as they are, give a misleading sense of Vanishing Point’s nature, representing an inaugural “fakeout” on behalf of Sarafian, akin to the trickery of Rafelson and Hellman. Within its opening minutes, Vanishing Point cuts away to a fast-moving, low-flying helicopter and Kowalski’s speeding Dodge Challenger. From this point onward, the action does not relent for the next half hour, as Kowalski’s attempts to evade police pursuit are documented in procedural detail.
More than any other film of the post–Easy Rider youth-cult road movie cycle, Vanishing Point is concerned with the evocation of the sense of speed. To that end, Sarafian stages the very kind of rapidly edited, spatially coherent chase sequences, replete with unusual camera angles and roaring soundtrack, that Hellman pointedly eschews when observing his protagonists’ velocity from a detached, fixed perspective in Two-Lane Blacktop. Vanishing Point freely crosscuts between shots of Kowalski’s car and its interior and the interiors of the pursuit vehicles. The action is observed from a multitude of shifting perspectives as cars race down highways, leap over embankments, tumble into ditches, and explode in fireballs. When it comes to representing vehicular action, Two-Lane Blacktop could not be more dissimilar to Sarafian’s film.
Genre and Character
Nevertheless, just as Two-Lane Blacktop invokes a set of generic expectations before quietly subverting them, in its own way Vanishing Point may be taken more broadly as an inversion of the action film genre. Sarafian’s film is also subversive, albeit in different ways. Vanishing Point employs all of the formal machinery and stylistic characteristics of the action genre in its depiction of high-speed car chases, yet its conventionally represented action set pieces are couched within a story line that is perfunctory to the point of abstraction. Kowalski instigates the chase for reasons that are not clearly explained or dwelled upon, jousting with motorcycle police officers with no regard for the legal consequences. Whether his actions are motivated by an antiauthoritarian streak or a death wish, the film offers no clear-cut psychological explanations. In fact, the flashback revealing Kowalski’s own personal history as a disenfranchised former police officer complicates rather than clarifies his standing in relation to the lawmen with whom he tangles. Does he retain some sense of solidarity that requires him to ensure that no serious harm befalls his pursuers (indeed, despite the many high-speed accidents, no police officer is ever seriously harmed in Vanishing Point), or did the circumstances of his exit from the police force leave Kowalski with such bitter disdain that he cannot help but direct his car at the first police motorcycles he encounters on the road?
Vanishing Point is based on the flimsiest of premises: speed for the sake of speed alone. Kowalski is driven to always drive faster. The authorities are bound to play their role and attempt to detain and punish him. The increasingly ludicrous scale of their efforts to arrest Kowalski’s passage is the only logical response to Kowalski’s insistent “dangerous driving and failure to stop” in the absence of motivation or provocation. Perhaps it is not necessary to attribute meaning to Kowalski’s actions; as Beck writes, it is entirely possible that “Kowalski is not intentionally running from the police but is merely going faster than they are.”15
Unlike Two-Lane Blacktop, which positions itself as a generic entity only to consciously veer away from the fulfillment of those generic expectations, Vanishing Point offers precisely what is expected of it—automotive thrills—and little besides that. The episodic nature of the film, as Kowalski occasionally retreats from the freeway to interact with the denizens of the desert, bears very little resemblance to earlier such episodic, madcap vehicular capers that peppered the mid-1960s: It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World (dir. Stanley Kramer, United Artists, 1963) and The Great Race (the former of which also featured the talents of Vanishing Point stunt driver Carey Loftin). Vanishing Point dispenses with the whimsy of those earlier films and recalls instead the lean efficiency of the car chase sequence from Bullitt, stretched here to feature length as an eerily empty formal evocation of speed itself. Sarafian’s car chases and crashes play out with the minimum of narrative context, meaning that entire action sequences read as exercises in how to stage a car chase and are no less visually arresting as such. In this respect, there is a fundamental element of subversion at play. In the absence of clearly established narrative context, the action sequences become hollow, formal displays. Beck echoes this sentiment when he states that Vanishing Point “refuses the escapism of the road movie genre and instead pursues the logic of maximum efficiency internalized by the film’s protagonist.”16 Indeed, when the film does disrupt the single-minded pursuit, and Kowalski veers off the road and interacts with the inhabitants of the wasteland, the film becomes less successful, as weak performances and dialogue are exposed. The very flimsiness of these characterizations and their depictions only strengthens the visceral excitement of Sarafian’s chase sequences by dint of comparison.
This is one important point of difference between Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop. Hellman’s film never bothers to spend much time in the places it passes through, its characters preferring constant motion, and the supporting cast is primarily filled out by similarly itinerant hitchhikers. Hellman’s monosyllabic (anti)heroes only emerge from the speed bubble of their Chevy to carry out transactions: for food, for car parts, and to set up races. Kowalski, on the other hand, does interact with the people he encounters in their native environments, and he finds the spaces of rural America to be in a state of decay, a hiding place for hermits, religious cults, racists, hippies, and homosexuals—all society’s exiles. Needless to say, Kowalski never once comes across the kind of decent, salt-of-the-earth folk that transfix Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider.
People of the desert nevertheless assist Kowalski. Dean Jagger’s hermit shields Kowalski from a police helicopter and directs him back to the freeway, while Timothy Scott’s hippie helps him to evade a police roadblock. Despite their assistance, these peripheral characters may as well be operating on different planes of existence from Kowalski. Their lives are defined within the closed circles of their localities, Kowalski’s life by the lethal pursuit of perpetual motion. Beck notes a fundamental schism at play here, both stylistically and narratively, as the relentless action of Kowalski’s on-road activities are “punctuated by ponderous stretches of desert stillness.”17 Furthermore, Beck sees a more profound structural relationship between “this temporal modulation” and “Kowalski’s periodic intake of amphetamines,” resulting in a “formal resistance to generic real time.”18
Following Beck’s line of reasoning that Kowalski’s occasional detours off-road into the tepid company of barely realized caricatures represents a literalization of the speed-freak’s lull between fixes, Vanishing Point offers an intriguing counterpoint to Easy Rider’s structural tendencies. Where Hopper consistently emulates the fractured and kaleidoscopic experience of the acid flashback, Sarafian conjures the frenzied desire for more speed—both automotively and chemically—leaving the viewer with a craving for more action whenever Kowalski takes a break from the chase to do less interesting things.
The ideologically mismatched marriage of classically depicted action sequences and narrative incoherence means that Vanishing Point’s moments of inaction are unable to fully engender the Zen sense of calm that permeates Hellman’s studiously one-note Two-Lane Blacktop. The war between form and content in Vanishing Point is both a testament to and rebuke of Elsaesser’s claim that the New Hollywood was predicated on a “fading confidence in the ability to tell a story.”19 Vanishing Point is expertly told and full of sound and fury, yet the events it depicts are unmotivated, without cause, and ultimately signify nothing. So while Vanishing Point aligns with the Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson Classical Hollywood narrative mode, this narrative machinery encases an empty core. Vanishing Point instead foregrounds vehicular action as its organizing narrative principle, so in this regard it aligns with Gunning’s cinema of attractions, much like Easy Rider. Within this context, Sarafian picks and chooses from the youth-cult road movie template, adopting the existential sense of aimlessness and liminal settings of the earlier films but situating them within a conventionally shot action mode.
The Downbeat Ending
Like Billy and Wyatt, Kowalski flouts conventional cinematic morality. Like Easy Rider, Vanishing Point backs itself into a moral corner, and Sarafian and Infante end their film with that most galvanizing of New Hollywood gestures, the resigned acquiescence to the downbeat, the fatal. Vanishing Point is in essence a film about suicide. Kowalski, defeated from the outset, pursued by the police across multiple states for no reason in particular, has only speed, and ultimately death awaits at the end of the road. Beck writes of the fireball that concludes the film, as Kowalski’s Challenger careers into the bulldozer blades, that “Kowalski’s crash, accompanied by the quixotic smirk we are offered in the moment before impact, is ecstatically final as the driver merges with the terminal velocity of the machine. Vanishing Point appears to be less about an imagined lost freedom (the Western topos) and much more concerned with the annihilation of the individual by the logic of acceleration.”20 Vanishing Point is haunted by the same air of fatalism and failure that pervades Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Two-Lane Blacktop. The endings of all four films resound with the same note of defeat, but Vanishing Point alone joins Easy Rider in killing its protagonist. While Two-Lane Blacktop finishes with the destruction of the film print itself, it also finds Taylor and Wilson stuck in a loop, much like Bobby Dupea, continuing to crisscross the country. Death may be implied in these concluding gestures, but it will have to wait until another day. Admittedly, the incineration that concludes Two-Lane Blacktop represents a metaphorical death of sorts, and as other writers have noted, Bobby Dupea may well be traveling to his demise at the close of Five Easy Pieces. Kowalski’s end comes as abruptly as those of Billy and Wyatt and is if anything even more jarring for the audience than the final scene of Hopper’s film. The apocalyptic fireball that engulfs Kowalski’s car as it collides with the roadblock is a disturbing termination of the cult of the martyred outsider spawned by Easy Rider.
Sarafian employs another “fakeout” in the scenes leading up to Kowalski’s death. Up to this point the cinematic style of Vanishing Point has indicated that Kowalski is heading for a moment of triumph, with uplifting soul music playing loudly on the soundtrack and rapid cross-cutting from Kowalski’s determined facial expression to the seemingly insurmountable roadblock that looms. Despite Vanishing Point’s slender story line, the tropes and conventions of the action film genre retain the expectations that Kowalski will elude his pursuers and successfully deliver the Dodge Challenger, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds. Such optimistic expectations are bolstered by the film’s adherence to the conventional stylistic modes of the action genre in its chase sequences. This stylistic coherence implies that a generically sanctioned conclusion awaits, a notion that ultimately proves incompatible with the developing narrative conventions of the youth-cult road movie cycle.
As Kowalski approaches the final roadblock, logic dictates that there is no way he can avoid the obstacle, but the insistent soundtrack and frantic crosscutting imply that an unexpected surprise looms. This surprise is Kowalski’s instantaneous death, as the upbeat, nondiegetic music is immediately silenced at the moment of impact, leaving only Kowalski’s “car welded . . . to the blades” of the bulldozer, resembling, in Sarafian’s eloquent reckoning, “a bent penis.”21 In melding the visage of vehicular death with the genital, Sarafian’s film coincides with J. G. Ballard’s darkly eroticized take on the same subject matter, Crash, which had been gestating in his short fiction and would be the subject of a 1971 BBC short documentary, before emerging in novel form in 1973. But unlike in Ballard’s vision, there is nothing to suggest that Kowalski finds sexual release in this moment. Is any triumph to be found in this gesture, then? Kowalski’s death affects no change and offers no significance.
Culture and Race
If any transcendence is to be found in Sarafian’s film, it is in the world’s continued existence after Kowalski’s exit from the scene. Easy Rider concludes with a similar sentiment, as the camera pulls away from the flaming wreckage of Wyatt’s motorcycle, which is soon lost by the retreating helicopter shot amid the greenery of the landscape as Roger McGuinn sings, “flow, river, flow, let your waters wash down, take me from this road, to some other town.” Life, too, goes on in Vanishing Point after the death of Kowalski. The film continues while the credits roll, and the inhabitants of the town gather around the wreckage of Kowalski’s car as lens flares appear in the sky. These lens flares are typical of John A. Alonzo’s cinematography on the film, which frequently seeks recourse in the wonder and magnitude of the natural environment. Vanishing Point’s wide-shot compositions take in shifting deserts, towering rock formations, and the scorched, bone-dry majesty of the wasteland, summoning the “vast sweep of America.”22 Alonzo, a former television western actor, was still honing his craft as a cinematographer on Vanishing Point, having shot a number of television documentaries and briefly been mentored by James Wong Howe. Alonzo later combined his penchant for handheld, documentary-style camerawork, sun-drenched locales, and gloomy interiors on Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1974).
Kowalski, nevertheless, is dead, and the problem remains of how to read the ending of the film. Despite Super Soul’s attempt to rally a countercultural movement around Kowalski’s gestures of refusal, his rebellion never really carries a seditious dimension. Super Soul himself is an interesting character, one of very few African American characters to appear in the predominantly white youth-cult road movie cycle. Actor Cleavon Little had appeared in the important proto-blaxploitation title Cotton Comes to Harlem (dir. Ossie Davis, United Artists, 1970) prior to Vanishing Point and subsequently filled the starring role vacated by Richard Pryor in the parody Blazing Saddles (dir. Mel Brooks, Warner Bros., 1974). In an uncharacteristic display of heterogeneity within this overwhelmingly Anglo film cycle, Super Soul wears a taqiyah and is vision impaired. Furthermore, Jake, the character to whom Kowalski first levels his automotive challenge, is played by African American actor Lee Weaver; never mind that Jake is a drug dealer, thus perpetuating the kinds of negative racial stereotypes that would soon come to dominate heated discursive exchanges on blaxploitation and the question of whether such representations empowered or demeaned African American audiences. Super Soul’s presence in Vanishing Point is similarly ambiguous. His identification with Kowalski stems from a sense of solidarity and resistance, and he uses his media platform to elevate Kowalski’s flight into a countercultural rallying point for the disenfranchised. In this regard Super Soul falls into the well-worn narrative trope often derisively referred to as the “magical Negro.” In line with the narrative trajectory commonly ascribed to this role, Super Soul eventually takes on a sacrificial martyrdom, when his studio is invaded and he is assaulted by an angry white mob and compelled into collaborating with the authorities. This sequence resonates uncomfortably with the tumultuous legacy of civil unrest and reactionary crackdowns of mob retribution that became all too familiar throughout the American South in the 1960s. This is a major point of difference from Easy Rider, in which such acts of racially motivated violence are verbally invoked but never depicted.
While Super Soul is quick to ascribe a sociopolitical agenda to Kowalski, all evidence in the film indicates that Kowalski flees the police merely for the sake of it. Like Billy and Wyatt, Kowalski spurns opportunities to join the countercultural types who cross his path. He wears plain clothing that betrays no hint of any subcultural affiliation: jeans and a plain, button-up, long-sleeved shirt, the same nondescript uniform donned by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in Two-Lane Blacktop. Vanishing Point’s many flashbacks suggest, for Beck, that “Kowalski’s outsider status is far from willed,” yet his origins are not antiestablishment, being a decorated returned serviceman and former police officer.23 Beck views Kowalski “as the everyman of postwar American youth culture.”24
In light of the character’s fairly extensive set of experiences prior to the events of Vanishing Point, the casting of the young, relatively anonymous Barry Newman as Kowalski seems an unusual choice, given that an older, more established screen presence may have lent more credibility and authority to the role. Before Vanishing Point, the relatively inexperienced Newman at that point had only one starring credit to his name, that of British director Sidney J. Furie’s The Lawyer (Paramount Pictures, 1970). In fact, his casting in Vanishing Point was another production prerequisite insisted upon by Dick Zanuck, who envisioned Newman as a future star.25 Sarafian originally wanted to cast Gene Hackman in the Kowalski role, and Hackman was interested, but the studio blocked this to make way for Newman. Hackman went on to star in The French Connection for Fox in the same year. Sarafian believed that the film needed a lead actor who “appeared to be the adult male, [who] fit behind the wheel of the car” and when Zanuck insisted on Newman, Sarafian decided that he was going to “make the car the star.”26 Sarafian’s original preference for Hackman would have further removed Vanishing Point from the youth-cult cycle, emphasizing Kowalski’s status as a grizzled, marginalized former establishment man, as much Harry Callahan or Popeye Doyle as Billy or Wyatt.
Sarafian also considered George C. Scott for the part.27 Scott ended up starring in The Last Run (dir. Richard Fleischer, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971), which uncannily resembles Vanishing Point, with Scott’s retired gangster Harry Garmes as an analogue of Kowalski, similarly drawn back into one final, fatal transcontinental driving job, this time from France to Portugal. The Last Run is a parallel reworking of Vanishing Point’s themes and narrative arc, stripping away the youth-cult accoutrements and American setting in favor of continental Europe, and a grizzled, hard-nosed generic mode. Nevertheless, the downbeat ending of The Last Run, which concludes with Scott’s death, suggests that Easy Rider’s narrative influence was extending beyond the parameters of the youth-cult cycle. Fleischer’s film simultaneously harks back to the equally terminal conclusions that were a hallmark of the film noir, another discrete film cycle which, filtered through the French New Wave, had been on the fringes of New Hollywood consciousness since Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (dir. Arthur Penn, Columbia Pictures, 1965). These tendencies would emerge more overtly in the coming years in the form of The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Parallax View (dir. Alan J. Pakula, Paramount Pictures, 1974).
The Last Run, in its narrative resemblance to Vanishing Point, gives an idea of what the latter film may have been like had Zanuck granted Sarafian’s wish to cast Scott (or Hackman). It is not difficult to imagine the kind of dramatic weight that Scott or Hackman might have brought to the Kowalski role, such was the stature of their respective screen presences. The near-unknown Newman nevertheless brings his own sense of transience, of nondescript mutability to the role. Ultimately, Zanuck’s resolute insistence on Newman’s casting shaped the film in ways the studio head could not have predicted, even as it precluded the wider audience that may have been drawn to an established star like Scott or a hot new figure like Hackman. Zanuck could not have known that Newman’s star would not rise, as Hackman’s would on the basis of his pugnacious turn as Popeye Doyle. Nevertheless, with the benefit of historical hindsight, Newman’s inert screen presence throughout Vanishing Point clearly stands at odds with the film’s most obvious commercial imperatives.
Selling the Film
Newman’s casting is one of many of Zanuck’s decisions that may have ultimately diminished the commercial viability of Vanishing Point. Another such ill-fated choice related to the film’s soundtrack. Sarafian initially edited the film to a temporary soundtrack taken from the album Motel Shot by Delaney & Bonney and Friends, a stark, predominantly acoustic album that featured the playing of Byrds affiliate and Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons, who was swimming in the same talent pool Hopper drew on for Easy Rider. The music from Motel Shot was vetoed for inclusion by Zanuck and Fox music department supervisor Lionel Newman, on the basis that the rights for that album were not owned by Twentieth Century Fox and the studio was unwilling to pay a rival publishing firm. Lionel Newman also rejected Sarafian’s attempt to include music by the music supervisor’s then-fledgling nephew Randy. Instead, Zanuck and Newman showed a working print to emerging artists and commissioned them to write songs inspired by the film. These groups included the Doug Dillard Expedition, Mountain, Longbranch Pennywhistle, and Kim Carnes, names that have not had the same longevity as the artists on the Easy Rider soundtrack. Hopper’s song selections were well timed, drawing on country rock’s melding of the pastoral with the psychedelic, with established name artists attracting more cinemagoers to the film and boosting the auxiliary market for soundtrack LP sales. Sarafian’s film, on the other hand, is soundtracked by the fundamentally urban sounds of soul and gospel music, which are an odd match for the rural setting of Vanishing Point and sit uneasily alongside many of the chase sequences.
Despite Zanuck’s keen involvement throughout the film’s preproduction, there are telling indications of a lack of studio confidence in the completed film. Between the shooting of Vanishing Point in 1970 and its eventual cinematic release in March 1971, Zanuck was deposed as studio head at Fox by his own father. Zanuck’s replacement, Dennis Carothers Stanfill, showed no favor for his predecessor’s pet project. Under Stanfill’s reign, the soundtrack album was mismarketed and poorly distributed, destroying the possibility for additional sources of revenue for the film. Sarafian says that Fox “didn’t see the potential for the soundtrack. I don’t think they saw the potential for the movie. I think they just wanted to put it back on the shelf and then get on with the new stuff that . . . the new head of studio wanted to make.”28 Barry Newman recalls that “Twentieth Century [Fox] had no faith in the movie” and that the studio “dumped the film in neighborhood theatres as a multiple release, and it was out of the theatres in less than two weeks.”29 Initial notices for Vanishing Point in the United States were not positive either, with Roger Greenspun in the New York Times naming it “a movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say.”30 Variety was similarly gloomy, deeming Vanishing Point “poorly-scripted, haphazardly edited tale of another ‘free soul’ running from the Establishment. Action marks only apparent outlet. Will need heavy sell.”31 The appropriately named Donald Chase, for Interview magazine, saw the film’s only success as “a commercial for the Dodge Challenger, stressing its speed, safety, maneuverability and endurance,” in turn, “setting a new high-water mark in disinterestedness.”32 Nonetheless, positive reception in the United Kingdom and Europe prompted a re-release in the United States on a double bill during the first run of The French Connection in October 1971.33
Since then, the status and legacy of Vanishing Point have grown. In some ways, Sarafian’s film was the template for the later Burt Reynolds vehicles White Lightning (dir. Joseph Sargent, United Artists, 1973), Smokey and the Bandit (dir. Hal Needham, Universal Pictures, 1977), and The Cannonball Run (dir. Hal Needham, Twentieth Century Fox, 1981). Television screenings in the mid-1970s and an eventual video release facilitated the growth of a cult audience for Vanishing Point. Scottish band Primal Scream borrowed the title of the film for its 1997 album, conceptualized as an alternate soundtrack to the film, and US group Audioslave released a music video for the song “Show Me How to Live” (2004), comprised of excerpts from the film. The following year, restored prints of both Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop were screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
If the reappraisal of Vanishing Point has not yet elevated the film to the status now enjoyed by Two-Lane Blacktop, the legacy of Sarafian’s film still appears to be healthily on the rise. Like Two-Lane Blacktop, this is at least partially attributable to newfound availability: Vanishing Point has also enjoyed a deluxe DVD release. Vanishing Point’s ultimate legacy rests on its reworking of the Easy Rider youth-cult iconography and production methodology into a commercial action movie formula. Mobile pseudo-documentary location shooting and the presence of an alienated male protagonist recall Hopper’s film, while Sarafian’s capable direction of action chase sequences contrasts starkly with the unhurried aesthetic modes of Rafelson and Hellman. Sarafian is unable to resolve the tension between these two conflicting narrative and stylistic modes, but ultimately Vanishing Point concludes by coming down on the Easy Rider side of the schism, adopting the youth-cult approved protagonist death. However, the appropriation of this narrative formula did not in itself guarantee commercial success, and nor did the more conventional commercial hallmarks of the action movie genre.
Two-Lane Blacktop was a film that in many ways eradicated its positive prerelease buzz and ultimate box-office viability. The lack of studio supervision over the production enabled Hellman to employ unconventional (by Hollywood standards) aesthetic and production practices that finally nonplussed audiences and critics alike. Vanishing Point offers a study of the reverse scenario: it was a movie already compromised by its attempts to meld the ideologically conflicting modes of the action genre and the momentary commercial viability of the youth-cult road movie cycle. While Sarafian’s location shooting may have offered him, like Hellman, a similar reprieve from studio interference, this shoot was already largely determined by studio head Zanuck’s preproduction interventions. Having had its director’s ambitions circumvented before the shoot began, Vanishing Point’s distribution was subsequently neglected by Zanuck’s successor as the youth market’s luster began to fade. As a film in conflict with itself, Sarafian’s Vanishing Point continues to fascinate not just through the dynamic excitement of its chase scenes, but also in its willingness to follow the starting point suggested by Easy Rider to its frightening conclusion, chronicling Kowalski’s single-minded pursuit of his own self-destruction, one man’s “apprenticeship toward becoming a projectile.”34