I finally saw The Sugarland Express, which is a 70’s car chase movie that is mostly distinguished in film geek circles as the first fully-theatrical feature from Steven Spielberg. He was all of 26 when he shot it. The boy genius on the Universal Studios lot had already been working in television for 3-4 years, and one of his TV movies, Duel (also a feature-length car chase), had been released theatrically in Europe to critical acclaim.
Spielberg was really playful with the camera back then – not in the hyper-cut, constantly-moving style you think of today, but with an uncanny knack for finding an impish way to compose a master shot, even out on location. The main characters are a young couple (played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run in Texas with a stolen cop car and a policeman hostage – she broke the husband out of prison because child protective services put their baby with a foster couple, and she wants to steal him back.
There’s a shot where the Captain of the Highway Patrol (Oscar-winning Western movie veteran Ben Johnson) first comes up alongside the fleeing vehicle in his own; and they talk to each other over their radios. And it’s a single, unbroken shot, from Hawn’s perspective in the back seat, as his car pulls up on the left, her husband warns him to keep his distance, he speeds up ahead, then drops back around their other side, then finally falls back in line behind them with the other cars in pursuit. The whole time they’re talking through the radio, and you can see Johnson’s lips moving in the other car. This shot wasn’t pieced together with effects or editing, they’re all ACTING, at full speed on the highway.
There’s another shot, originating from Johnson’s car, where the top half of the screen catches his eyes in his rear view mirror, and the bottom half is filled with the rear window of the hostage vehicle. Hawn’s in the back seat, holding a shotgun in one hand, but playfully finger-drawing on the back window with the other. In a single shot we get to see both her, and him studying her. Not only is it a clever trick of framing, it gets across what’s so important in that moment – that he’s realizing these are just a couple of dumb, scared kids in way over their heads, and he really doesn’t want to have to kill them.
That’s what’s finally so startling to me about The Sugarland Express, because I feel like that spirit makes it utterly foreign to today’s America and today’s audience. I don’t know if it’s 30 years of Reaganomics pitting everyone savagely against each other, or our culture’s full-tilt embrace of the Just World fallacy (in which we are only able to cope with the horrors and injustices we see by finding reasons why the victims must have deserved their fate), but most people not only have no more sympathy for the poor and petty, they actively wish to see their harm. I think a contemporary audience would get restless to the point of outright anger that these tragic fools weren’t tased, beaten with clubs, and riddled with bullets ten minutes into the movie. The hostage, too – who, after all, was stupid enough to get caught.