The disenfranchised men in the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle found the locus of their alienation on the open roads of the American backcountry, yet in 1971 Hollywood was exploiting a thematically comparable cycle featuring isolated men transplanted to the mean streets of major American cities. The protagonists of Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, and Two-Lane Blacktop share an implied history, having turned their backs on urban dwellings in favor of the transitory, liminal spaces of the open road, a changing yet undifferentiated blur of truck stops, diners, motels, roadside campfires, and car backseats. The cinematography of Easy Rider and Vanishing Point counterpoints these settings with passages of lyrical landscape photography, suggesting that the grandeur of America’s natural scenery may provide moments of transcendence, offering some validation for the nomadic, drop-out lifestyles that Billy, Wyatt, and Kowalski adopt as they race toward their sinister appointments with destiny. Hellman’s film finds Taylor’s driver and Wilson’s mechanic thoroughly enmeshed in an alternate underground economy of the street-racing circuit, which offers them a degree of autonomous self-sufficiency, provided they can keep moving fast enough. The slow burn that consumes the print at the end of that film suggests that inevitably, eventually, their machine will fail.
Factors such as costume design, soundtrack selection, and the vaguely antiauthoritarian stance adopted by many of the youth-cult road movies prompted critics in the early 1970s to label the cycle as inherently liberal, when they registered on the critical radar at all. The lukewarm response afforded to such a deliberately understated film as Two-Lane Blacktop is a dramatic counterpoint to the polarizing furor generated by the release of Dirty Harry later that year. Within months of tepidly praising Hellman’s film in a hesitant review, Roger Ebert was stirred to far stronger emotions by Don Siegel’s film, which he lambasted as “fascist, no doubt about it.”1 Such accusations were echoed by the predominantly left-wing critical establishment at the time of Dirty Harry’s release.
Robert B. Ray contrasts the youth-cult films and the urban cop films as cycles Left and Right, operating effectively as variations on the same theme with diametrically opposed political dispositions, writing that “the movies . . . appeared to be describing the same events from different perspectives.”2 Yet with the benefit of further historical distance, the distinction between Left and Right looks a little shaky. Far from offering a utopian vision of countercultural free-living, Easy Rider expresses a conflicted and open-ended political ideology, in part to ensure broad commercial appeal. Sampling a selection of Easy Rider’s imitators, we find the well-intentioned naïveté of Billy and Wyatt stripped away, leaving the resignation and pathological recalcitrance of Bobby Dupea, the suicidal fireball-in-waiting Kowalski, and the sketches in human form of the driver and the mechanic. While these films are open to different political readings, what they share, at their base, is the representation of alienated young men fleeing America’s urban centers. All of these characters bring with them, to varying degrees, suggestions of earlier lives left behind. This is made clearer in the expository passages of Five Easy Pieces and Vanishing Point (both of which, notably, are withheld until deep into their respective films), but left to be merely guessed at in the case of Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Whether the protagonists of these films attempt to suppress their anxieties through a pantomime of downward mobility, temporarily appropriating blue-collar labor (Bobby Dupea, Kowalski, Adam Gaines), or turn further from society altogether, lured by the pursuit of vehicular speed (Billy, Wyatt, The Driver, Little Fauss, and Halsy Knox), ultimately these films offer no happy endings. At best, these characters find themselves at the end of their films at a crossroads of uncertainty, their situations no better than we found them two hours earlier.
If we are to imagine that Taylor’s driver and Wilson’s mechanic fled some urban center to take up their nomadic life crisscrossing the underground street-race circuit, it is worth considering exactly what was going on in Hollywood’s urban cinescapes in 1971. It may come as no surprise that by and large, these films are no more optimistic than their highway-bound counterparts. In the highest-grossing film of 1970, Love Story (dir. Arthur Hiller, Paramount Pictures), a move from Cambridge, Massachusetts to New York City coincides with the diagnosis of the cancer that will slowly claim Ali MacGraw’s character’s life during the remainder of that film. The second-highest-grossing film of that year, Airport (dir. George Seaton, Universal Pictures), finds airways under threat from a bomb-toting, downtrodden demolitions expert determined to leave his wife with his life insurance money after he blows himself up midflight. Of course, such menacing visions of the dark side of American city life are not specific to the early 1970s; from George O’Brien’s seduction by the deadly charms of the bustling metropolis in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Fox Film Corporation, 1927) to the seediest extremes of film noir (say, The Naked City [dir. Jules Dassin, Universal Studios, 1948]), Hollywood films have often sounded cautionary notes about the dangers of urban life while simultaneously exalting in the glamour of the big city.
What is more specific to the films of the early 1970s is the all-encompassing sense of decay, both architectural and moral, that accompanies urban settings of that era and reaches out to strangle the protagonists of these films. In Love Story, this malevolence comes in the form of Ryan O’Neal character’s father, played by Ray Milland, whose dominating patriarchy paralyzes his son, cutting him off from the life of privilege young Oliver Barrett IV enjoyed before falling in with the young woman from the wrong side of the tracks. In Airport, it is the suffocating pressure of urban life that drives D. O. Guerrero to undertake his suicidal pyrotechnic mission, while stifling bureaucracy on the ground threatens to speed his passage toward oblivion. Two particularly useful examples of the nihilistic representations of urban life circa 1971 come from two of the most commercially successful films of that year, exemplary exponents of the violent cop cycle: Dirty Harry and The French Connection.
A close examination of these two films, their formal workings, and the circumstances of their productions, and a reevaluation of their critical reception will indicate that the violent cop cycle in fact works a similar furrow to the films of the post–Easy Rider, youth-cult road movie cycle. An examination of the factors that led the urban cop cycle to be read in such politicized terms raises more points for consideration about the implications of stardom, auteurism, and cinematic style, and the role that each played in influencing the films’ critical reception and the construction of their historical legacy. Taken in tandem, these two cycles complicate contemporary approaches to the New Hollywood and offer fresh perspectives on the way the United States saw itself reflected in the popular entertainment of 1971.