It’s well known that the gritty, independently minded cinema
that defined the seventies officially began in the final year of the previous
decade with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider.
It was the perfect bridge between the goofy acid and motorcycle movies
of Roger Corman’s sixties independents and seventies landmarks like Five Easy Pieces and The French Connection, with their
sexist antiheroes and unflinching cynicism. While Easy
Rider has a hazy reputation for celebrating the sixties’ hippies, drug
culture, and Rock & Roll, it’s really a eulogy of that era.
Hopper is Billy
and co-screenwriter Peter Fonda is Wyatt, outlaws in cowboy hats and leather
jackets riding across the wide-open west on their iron horses. Just like the
cowboys of frontier times, they are also doomed to extinction. They visit a
hippie commune lapsed into depression and destitution. Instead of changing
hearts and minds with their in-your-face freedom, they meet a succession of
unmovable, hostile, long-hair-hating rednecks. They end up weeping on acid.
They end up in jail. There they meet a short-haired, tie-wearing lawyer (Jack
Nicholson in the performance that rightfully made him a star) who’d never even
smoked pot but seems to understand and embrace the joys of freedom more than
they ever could. Wyatt sums up the film’s true message when
Billy crows about a drug deal that will make them “rich” and able to “retire in Florida” (hardly hippie ideals) with a deflated “We blew it.”
Things get worse from there.
Easy Rider is a defeated
survey of sixties Utopianism. It packs a particular punch because
it’s made by two guys who’d believed in that ideology. The general failure
of that ideology largely led to the cynicism that plagued seventies cinema. Yet
there is joy in its songs (The Byrds, The Band, Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix), László
Kovács’s gorgeous panoramic
cinematography, and Jack Nicholson’s exuberant performance. The set piece in
which the guys sell drugs to Phil Spector as heavy airplane traffic roars
twenty feet above their heads is an ingenious piece of ultra-noisy “silent”
filmmaking. The haunting graveyard acid trip is cinema’s first— and
perhaps only— psychedelic sequence that does not feel like a comic strip parody.
Don Camber’s flashing editing creates tension in the most serene scenes.
In 2010, The Criterion Collection gave Easy Rider a major hi-def renovation as part of the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story blu-ray/DVD box set. Last
year, Criterion began the process of breaking up that collection with a
stand-alone release of Five Easy Pieces,
and it continues this year by putting out Easy Rider on its own (Head,
meanwhile, will be part of Rhino’s endlessly upcoming Monkees Complete Series box set). This release is identical to the
one in The BBS Story with the same hi-def
restoration, extras (two commentaries; two documentaries from the nineties; a
revealing interview with BBS’ Steve Blauner, who gives some fascinating
information on his days working with The Monkees; two minutes of B&W
footage from Cannes 1969 featuring Hopper and Fonda), and even booklet essay.
Fortunately, all of that stuff was great in The
BBS Story, so if you wanted Easy Rider but didn’t want to spring for
the whole box, this new release is ideal.
