A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974)

William Atherton, Michael Sacks, and Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express
Cast: Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Michael Sacks, Ben Johnson, Gregory Walcott, Steve Kanaly, Louise Latham, Harrison Zanuck, A.L. Camp, Jessie Lee Fulton, Dean Smith, Ted Grossman. Screenplay: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Steven Spielberg. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Art direction: Joe Alves. Film editing: Edward M. Abroms, Verna Fields. Music: John Williams. 

Critics disagree in the most interesting ways. When Roger Ebert reviewed The Sugarland Express in 1974, he disliked Steven Spielberg's use of the automobiles: "If the movie doesn't finally succeed, that's because Spielberg has paid too much attention to all those police cars (and all the crashes they get into), and not enough to the personalities of his characters." But for Pauline Kael, the cars were one of the major reasons she referred to Spielberg's first theatrical feature as "one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies": "Spielberg patterns the cars; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. The cars have tiffs, wrangle, get confused. And so do the people." For once (and I don't think it always happened), Kael's insight into a director's gift was more acute than Ebert's. She got at the essence of at least one aspect of Spielberg's genius as a moviemaker: the ability to provide an environment for characters, to express their personalities through their toys and tools. Goldie Hawn never gave a better performance than she does in this film, perfectly capturing the naïveté, the vanity, and the implacable determination of Lou Jean, showing the grit behind the giggle. (She and William Atherton do a wonderful scene in which they do almost nothing but laugh.) I think Ben Johnson is a little underused as the highway patrol captain in charge of trying to capture Lou Jean and Clovis, while at that same time trying to rescue the young officer (Michael Sacks) they have hijacked, but maybe that's because Johnson was such an old pro that we naturally want to see more of him. The film was unaccountably not a box office success, but to my mind it's one of Spielberg's best movies, with a texture of supporting characters (and cars) that aptly reminded Kael of Preston Sturges.

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