Vanishing Point (1971)

VANISHING POINT  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Richard C. Sarafian
    Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger,
    Victoria Medlin, Arthur Malet, Anthony James,
    Gilda Texter, Severn Darden, Timothy Scott
An existential car-chase movie stripped down to its bare essentials, about an auto-delivery driver named Kowalski (Barry Newman) who makes a bet that he can drive a souped-up Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in 36 hours. Bleary-eyed, cranked on speed and wanted by the highway patrol in three states, Kowalski roars west, while a blind soul D.J. (Cleavon Little) provides on-the-air radio updates and encouragement. The America depicted here is a wasteland whose scattered inhabitants - an unlikely melting pot of bikers, hippies, rednecks, Christian revivalists, black hipsters and gay holdup men - seem to be there not by choice, or because they belong there, but because they've got nowhere else to be. The same is true of Kowalski, who only really exists behind the wheel - "the last American hero," the D.J. calls him - tearing over some empty highway or off-road across the desert, a quarter-mile and a cloud of dust ahead of the cops. Decide for yourself if the climactic bulldozer roadblock is the real vanishing point, or if Kowalski has reached it long before the movie ends.