Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider

Wyatt: Peter Fonda
Billy: Dennis Hopper
George Hanson: Jack Nicholson
Connection: Phil Spector
Stranger on Highway: Luke Askew
Lisa: Luana Anders
Sarah: Sabrina Scharf
Jack: Robert Walker Jr.
Mary: Toni Basil
Karen: Karen Black

Director: Dennis Hopper
Screenplay: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern
Cinematography: László Kovács
Art direction: Jeremy Kay
Film editing: Donn Cambern

In his book Have You Seen... David Thomson discusses all the ways in which Easy Rider became a landmark film, usually cited along with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) as one of the harbingers of the revolution in American filmmaking at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, movies that signaled the emergence of a new, younger film audience. And then Thomson calls Easy Rider "unwatchable." As one who was part of that new, younger film audience, I tend to agree. Except for every moment when Jack Nicholson is onscreen, launching one of the great film careers, Easy Rider really is unwatchable. The drug buy and sale that sets up the odyssey of Wyatt and Billy across America is clumsily scripted and filmed. The beginnings of their motorcycle tour is remarkable only for the nod to John Ford in the glimpses of Monument Valley, and the stay in the hippie commune is tedious. The one interesting moment comes when László Kovács's camera does a 360 degree pan across the faces of the communards, an echo of the similar pan of the faces sheltering in the barn in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) and maybe of Raoul Coutard's pan around the farmyard in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), except that there's little of interest in the faces assembled in the commune. (The sequence only made me realize that the people gathered there are now, if still alive, collecting Social Security.)  But when Nicholson appears, the film snaps sharply into focus, only to sag back into its old tired ways. The scene in which George Hanson is murdered is awkwardly staged, so that we don't really know what's going on until it's over, and the rest of the film is just waiting for the inevitable demise of Wyatt and Billy. The acid trip in the New Orleans cemetery is little more than a collection of avant garde clichés. There are a few compensations, like the music on the soundtrack, and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper do a good job of delineating Wyatt and Billy, the latter dangerously volatile, the former more cautious and laid back. But Easy Rider is showing its age, looking more and more like a 50-year-old movie, while some of its other celebrated contemporaries wear their age with grace.

Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)

Barbara Harris, as the "spiritualist" Blanche Tyler, is the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock's last movie. According to Stephen Whitty's  The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, Hitchcock wanted Harris for the role, but he met resistance from the studio, which wanted a bigger name, so he cast Karen Black in the slightly lesser role of Fran to please the higher-ups, who gave Black higher billing than Harris. Which brings up an old question: Why did Harris never become a major star? She made an impressive movie debut in A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965), was a standout in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), and received an Oscar nomination for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (Ulu Grosbard, 1971), but is pretty much forgotten today. She may just be a case of the right talent having been born at the wrong time: Harris had just turned 40 when she made Family Plot. If she had been born a decade later, she might have given Goldie Hawn or, even later, Meg Ryan competition for the romantic comedy roles they became famous for. Family Plot is feather-light lesser Hitchcock, though on the whole it's a return to form for the director after the rather grim Frenzy (1972) and the late misfires Topaz (1969) and Torn Curtain (1967). There are some touches of the master director to be seen in it. The film makes us think that its main story is that of Blanche and her boyfriend George Lumley (Bruce Dern) as they try to track down the missing heir to a fortune, but as Blanche and George are riding in his cab arguing, he suddenly slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a woman crossing the street. The camera takes a sharp left turn and follows the woman instead, taking us into a plot about jewel thieves. The setup is in Ernest Lehman's screenplay, but Hitchcock is classically artful in the way he keeps both plots dangling until we can see how they intersect. There's another glimpse of the master at work in the way he films George trying to meet up with a woman he's trying to question. The scene takes place in a cemetery, and Hitchcock films it with an overhead camera so that we can see the crossing paths among the graves as George maneuvers his way toward the woman. I doubt that Hitchcock ever played one, but the sequence reminds me of a video game maze. Harris, Black, and Dern are all good in their roles, and William Devane is a fine villain. (Though have there ever been toothier leading men than Dern and Devane?) John Williams adds a touch of Bernard Herrmann in some parts of his score, the only one he did for Hitchcock.