OVP: Easy Rider (1969)

Film: Easy Rider (1969)
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Luke Askew
Director: Dennis Hopper
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Jack Nicholson, Best Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Seeing a classic film is a bit trippy our your virgin viewing.  I've managed to avoid most spoilers regarding Easy Rider, but you can't avoid the iconic impact of the film.  You feel it the second that Peter Fonda rides onto the screen on that giant red, white, and blue Harley with "Born to Be Wild" howling at you.  When you view something as celebrated as Easy Rider, even though it's your first time through the movie, you can feel how familiar it is thanks to its influence on all subsequent cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead for the Uninitiated) The film feels so sincerely like a French New Wave movie that it's difficult to pinpoint down key plot points, particularly for the first half of the film.  The movie starts with Captain America (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) smuggling cocaine in from Mexico and receiving an enormous amount of money.  After this, we get a bird's eye view of the country in 1968.  While I didn't live through it, and am therefore unable to process exactly what was the stuff of peyote-induced myth and what truly happened, there's an authenticity in having three actors who came-of-age in the decade portraying these biking hippies.

The film takes us to a commune, and an extended portrayal of free love and community.  The film's strongest story element is the way it never really tells us what is going on in the heads and minds of Fonda's Captain America (who doesn't get a real name until the penultimate scene of the movie) and Billy.  While Billy is clearly the more temperamental of the two and Captain America the more mellow, we learn very little about their past and are only focused on the present.  This story-structure absorbs itself so well into the message of the film, about living for the moment, and really allows us as an audience to be sitting on the backs of their hogs, rather than trying to deduce their actions.

About the only character who gets a clearly defined history and sense of purpose is George Hanson (Nicholson).  Hanson is an alcoholic lawyer who clearly was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and with a sense of curious adventure in his heart.  He readily joins their gang, and sets out in the second half of their film on the adventure.  For those who think of this as a Jack Nicholson film (this was his first big break, and it's very rare to think of Jack as anything other than the star of a movie that he's in), he's actually only in the last third of the film in any prominent role.  After an hour of hippie-love and drugs and Route 66, the bikers head into the Deep South, and are greeted in an unfriendly manner.

First, after making eyes at some girls (really, they were making more eyes at our protagonists), the local men come and beat the bikers with bats, injuring Billy and Captain America and killing George.  The film then heads into an acid-induced haze, complete with dancing in a New Orleans graveyard and Fonda reciting a soliloquy to a statue that he confuses with his mother.  The film's final two scenes are left to be very open-ended, with Billy thinking that they succeeded in their journey and Captain America feeling "they blew it" (because of the enigma surrounding the two men, you don't 100% know what their goals of the trip were).  The final scenes involve a pair of Southerners in a truck shooting both Billy and Captain America in cold blood while they drive past them, afraid of their counter-culture status.

The best parts of the film are the breathtaking cinematography, quite frequently playing with the autumn colors of the road, and Nicholson's performance.  Nicholson, in his first big break as an actor, sells George with all of those flourishes that we'd come to associate with Jack, but he has a neophyte calmness to the movie.  There's no Jack Torrance-style flourishes in the film, just a cool, calculated drunken lawyer playing well within the film's boundaries.  Jack is one of the greatest actors in film history, but it's nice to see him before fame had hit and directors catered to him; it's proof that he could also fill the vision of the filmmaker.

The movie's soundtrack bellows pretty fiercely across the entire movie, filling every turn of the film with some great 60's band, whether it be The Band or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, it sounds like a Woodstock concert.  The film oddly landed a nomination for Best Screenplay, despite it clearly being quite improvised and rather light on dialogue (these days you'd never see such an out-there nomination in the category).  Really the only thing I can think of in the movie that doesn't play quite right today is the atmosphere of the piece-we've moved beyond communes and hippies and onto Miley Cyrus twerking debates (you can figure out for yourself what direction that's a step into), making this film very much a product of its own era.

But it's still a worthwhile adventure, and a movie I can definitely see the "classic" in.  For those of you who have taken in Easy Rider-what are your thoughts?  Do you think it still holds up some 44 years later?  Do you think that Jack should have beaten Gig Young for the Oscar?  Share in the comments!