Vanishing Point (1971)

Director: Richard C. Sarafian
Writer(s): Guillermo Cabrera Infante, from a story outline by Malcolm Hart
Starring: Barry Newman, Clevon Little, Dean Jagger, and Victoria Medlin

When it comes to cars, I am not your typical male.  That is to say, I don’t get hard-ons from car magazines, I couldn’t care less about old models and their value, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about fixing one.  I appreciate that they get me from point A to point B, I don’t mind driving them, but that’s the extent of my relationship with vehicles.

With this in mind, a movie like Vanishing Point probably would have never ended up on my radar had it not been the focal point of Audioslave’s music video for “Show Me How To Live”.  While also not a fan of popular music or anything on the radio, I loved Audioslave—created out of three parts Rage Against the Machine and one part Soundgarden (Chris Cornell, one of the best rock vocalists of all time)—and still find them to be an underrated band, with Rage fans scoffing that they weren’t heavy enough, and Soundgarden fans missing the complexity inherent in that band’s work.

But this review isn’t about them—this is about Kowalski, a former police officer and race car driver who bets a drug dealer that he can make a delivery from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours; if he “wins”, he gets free drugs.  If he loses, then the next bet is “double or nothing”.  This bet occurs about five minutes in, he hits the road, and that is pretty much the entire plot, which then becomes one ridiculously long car chase, as the police desperately try to catch the speeding, reckless Kowalski.

Wisely, the filmmakers do manage to break up the action with little snippets here and there—we flash back to Kowalski’s past as a race car driver, where we get a glimpse of his need for speed, and in a separate and unrelated flashback, also watch him as he stops a fellow police officer from raping a young girl, an event that got him kicked off the force—but for the vast majority of Vanishing Point’s duration, it’s him outrunning cops, or making fools of people that dare to race him.

And honestly, it’s pretty damn brilliant—a refreshingly simple film that provides many genuine scenes of pure excitement.  Of course, the focus is on the car chases and various stunts, which are convincingly pulled off, but the film also succeeds as an ode to hippie culture, with many civilians cheering Kowalski to succeed, and booing the cops that are trying to put him away. The whole film has a pretty strong anti-authority slant, which makes it both an interesting time capsule look into the moment in time in which it was made, and an effective protest film for current times, with the increasing hostility and distrust civilians have of a militarizing police force; one that constantly gets away with the murder of the unarmed.

Vanishing Point was made in the early ‘70s, and it seems to embrace this time period: There’s a topless woman on a motorcycle (with a boyfriend nearby) offering Kowalski sex, a man that trades snakes for sugar, coffee, and “lots and lots of beans”, and a blind radio DJ that monitors police radio frequencies and keeps him one step ahead of the pigs.  This is almost just as much an ode to freewheeling hippie culture as it is an extended car chase.  And you know what?  It works;  I found myself siding with Kowalski as well, and agreeing with most of the citizens in the film—he never hurt anyone, so why such an aggressive campaign to stop him?

Regardless of your thoughts on the underlying politics, Vanishing Point functions as an overlong, yet consistently thrilling, car chase that rarely lets up, and assuming you’re in the vast majority of people that haven’t ever heard of this, one that should shoot toward the top of your list of movies to check out.

RECAP: Vanishing Point is basically a car chase elongated to feature length, with a driver named Kowalski betting a drug dealer that he can drive from Denver to San Francisco to make a delivery in 15 hours.  Some of it feels dated now, with some obvious odes to the hippie and drug cultures of the time period, but it’s never less than fascinating, while its freewheeling, anti-authority and anti-establishment attitudes are a breath of fresh air from the norm.  It almost feels like a punk album in coherent video form, and when it sticks to the action sequences, it’s a rousing, adrenaline-pumping success.  For fans of car chases or action films, this has you covered; for fans of both, this should be considered required viewing.

RATING: 7.5/10

(NOTE: For conspiracy theorists, or those just interested in unsolved mysteries, Victoria Medlin, the actress who plays Vera Thornton, supposedly died on February 27th, 1978.  Very little is known about her life and death, and her filmography consists of three movies.  Rumors persist that she dated Paul Stanley from KISS, and that she committed suicide after their breakup in his father's furniture store on the above date, with the band's management desperate to cover it up, but nothing has been corroborated.  It's simultaneously fascinating and sad that, even in the Internet age, with so much information freely available, that someone's life can just completely fall through the cracks.)