Grenzpunkt Null

This is the essential 1970s anti-hero movie. It is not supposed to make sense and I have often wondered if it were not meant to be someone's psychedelic dream. Nudity when nudity would not seem to fit; bad cops; beaten people out of sync with plot line. Sounds like a trip. The cast is excellent and this is one of Cleavon Little's last main roles as well as the last main role for the early love interest. John Amos is so underplayed he is almost unrecognizable, I'd love to see his commentary on the movie. And one guy is so ripping off James Dean (though as a racist) that it is unintentionally funny. I'd recommend it as an addition to any American tape library. A true cult classic.

Many people don't know where the radio d.j. was broadcasting from in the movie. He was broadcasting from the then closed Goldfield Hotel, in beautiful "downtown" Goldfield Nevada! I should know! I was a resident in this picturesque little town of 110 people (in 1971). The Goldfield Hotel has since found new life as a restored historical landmark. The town itself has surged in population due to new mining processes, and the re-opening of the long closed mines. During the movie, a scene picturing the front of the "Green Frog Market", you will see the faint glow of a freckle-faced, red headed little boy, gazing out of the window......yeah..it's me!! This movie was quite exciting in a town of 110 people!

Vanishing Point is a difficult film to assess in many ways. As a movie, it is quite flawed. The plot is obvious but ultimately quite shallow - centering around Kowalski trying to deliver a car across the country in record time. Kowalski's back story is hinted at, which makes the film a bit more interesting, but his back story takes up only a few minutes of the film.

The characters and performances are often vacuous, failing to leave an impression. Barry Newman is the chief culprit, turning in a most colourless, emotionless performance where he personally offers little insight into his character. The exception is Cleavon Little as the hyperactive DJ Super-Soul; his interplay with Newman is novel, some of his dialogue is memorable (indeed, his rambling about Kowalski and the 'police Nazis' was quoted by Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses twenty years later) and his input gives the film some badly needed impetus.

Luckily though, Vanishing Point works better on other levels. For instance, it has that early 1970's style that makes the film more compelling than it should be. Newman is chiefly responsible for this; he is certainly emotionless, but that allows him to develop an air of 'cool' that suits the film. The white Dodge Challenger is a very nice touch.

The early 70's style also allows it to work as a period piece; Kowalski encounters counter-culture hippies, religious fanatics in the desert and the police. The fractious state of race relations between blacks and whites at that time is also highlighted. On the downside, it does substantially date the film. It's a cult classic for a reason; as the failed 1997 remake demonstrated, a movie like Vanishing Point would not work nearly as well in another era.

It also works reasonably well as a straight driving film. The film is punctuated with enough car crashes and chases to move the film forward.

However, the film's real saving grace is in its many allegories. The largely empty plot does ironically enable this, because you can read whatever you want into the film. I therefore understand why the plot is so empty, because the many allegories punctuated within the film make it intriguing to watch. For instance, why did Kowalski's face shine towards the end? Why were there so many STOP signs? Was Super-Soul a spiritual guide to Kowalski? You can also have fun inventing allegories that weren't even intended - why was the Dodge Challenger white, for example?

Ultimately, Vanishing Point is not the easiest film to assess. In conventional terms, I would not rank the film particularly highly because the plot, characters, acting and dialogue are often unimpressive. As such, the casual movie viewer may not particularly identify with it. However, Vanishing Point is not a particularly conventional film; like most good films it moves itself forward well, but it is the film's style and allegorical nature that largely keeps the interest and pushes the film above the ruck of many other driving movies. I also admit that the film could not have been as effective as an allegory if the plot wasn't so insubstantial. With this in mind, I have decided to give it:

3.5/5 stars

Richard Sarafian's 1971 film "Vanishing Point" is, for starters, a fascinating study of those persons anthropologists sometimes term "marginal men"--individuals caught between two powerful and competing cultures, sharing some important aspects of both but not a true part of either, and, as such, remain tragically confined to an often-painful existential loneliness. Inhabiting a sort of twilight zone between "here" and "there," a sort of peculiar purgatory, these restless specters cannot find any peace or place, so they instead instinctively press madly on to some obscure and unknown destination, the relentless journey itself being the only reason and justification.

Disc jockey Super Soul (Cleavon Little) and delivery driver Kowalski (Barry Newman) are two of these specters, marginal but decent, intelligent men who can't or won't live in burgeoning competing cultures which in reality have offered them very little of worth or substance, despite their own personal sacrifices. Kowalski himself had tried to "fit in" with the Establishment as a soldier and police officer and later, attempted to do the same with the blossoming 1960s counterculture, but soon disappointingly found that they both were ridden with their own various forms of dishonesty and insincerity. Personal honor, self-reliance and genuine respect--Kowalski's stock in trade--were tragically valued very little by either, despite each one's shrill and haughty claims to the contrary.

Moreover, it's no accident Newman's character has a Polish surname; the Poles throughout their history have created a very rich and unique Slavic culture largely based upon just such a "marginality"--being geographically jammed between powerful historic enemies, Germany and Russia, and never being able to fully identify with either one, at often great cost to themselves. It's also no accident Little's character is blind and black, the only one of his kind in a small, all-Caucasian western desert town--his sightlessness enhancing his persuasiveness and his ability to read Kowalski's mind, the radio microphone his voice, his race being the focus of long simmering and later suddenly explosive disdain--all of the characteristics of a far-seeing prophet unjustly (but typically) dishonored in his own land.

The desert environment also plays a key role in cementing the personal relationship between and respective fates of these two men--to paraphrase British novelist J.G. Ballard, prophets throughout our history have emerged from deserts of some sort since deserts have, in a sense, exhausted their own futures (like Kowalski himself had already done) and thus are free of the concepts of time and existence as we have conventionally known them (as Super Soul instinctively knew, thus creating his own psychic link to the doomed driver.) Everything is somehow possible, and yet, somehow nothing is.

Finally, VP is also a "fin de siecle" story, a unique requiem for a quickly dying age- a now all-but-disappeared one of truly open roads, endless speed for the joy of speed's sake, of big, solid no-nonsense muscle cars, of taking radical chances, of living on the edge in a colorful world of endless possibility, seasoned with a large number and wide variety of all sorts of unusual characters, all of which had long made the USA a wonderful place--and sadly is no longer, having been supplanted by today's swarms of sadistic, military-weaponed cop-thugs, obsessive and intrusive safety freaks, soulless toll plazas, smug yuppie SUV drivers, tedious carbon-copy latte towns, and a childish craving for perfect, high-fuel-efficiency safety and security.

The just-issued DVD contains both the US and UK releases of the film; the UK release, I believe, is a much more satisfying film, as it has the original scenes deleted from the US version. As an aside, Super Soul's radio station call letters, KOW, are in fact the ones for a country & western station in San Diego.

Gosh, I had forgotten how powerful this is.

Seeing it again is a real lesson on how certain cinematic language, if presented purely, transcends. And for a US-made movie, it is pretty pure.

If you do not know it, the primary narrative is essentially no narrative: a muscle car speeding across the desert chased by police, initially for speeding and ultimately just to exert power. This fellow is Kowalski, a name imported from a landmark film. He simply drives. It is his life now. We see flashbacks. Find he was a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, a star racer and then a cop. There's a backstory about his being a good cop and turning in some rotten apples, so by degrees we come to understand the moral landscape.

There is only one other character, a blind black disk jockey who is listened to by apparently everyone. Guided by his eavesdropping on police radio, and some psychic ability.

This was after "Easy Rider" and instead of bold men moving into a life, we have life chasing an honest man. Same ethic, could even have been the same man. But he knows himself. He knows he is a cinematic creature, someone to be observed and dreamed about. He knows he carries his world with him. Always borrowed.

You can see Malick here, the notion that the character sees us seeing him, that he knows he is fictional and knows we think him not. You can trace it to the female version in "Thelma and Louise," where they have their end only because they know someone will watch. Its not like "Cool Hand Luke," or "Bonnie and Clyde" at all where the man decides. That comes from the Hollywood western.

Its derived from the "Breathless" tradition.

A good third of this film is spent on the "audience," the rural townspeople. These parts are filmed in a documentary style, with — it seems — real people who have come to watch the filming, having heard on the radio from a borrowed soul. They look dumb and bored, clearly with nothing better to do than watch, just like us.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.