Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971)

Car deliveryman Kowalski (Barry Newman) has to deliver a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in three days. 

Fuelled by benzedrine and a bet, he intends to reach his destination in two, all obstacles be damned...

After covering three seventies movies featuring car chases, I was keen to check out a few more.

While filled with more vehicular action than Bullitt or The French Connection, Vanishing Point is closer to a road trip movie than a thriller. 

The film is pretty episodic, as our hero interacts with different sets of characters throughout his journey.

Made at the turn of the decade, Vanishing Point feels like a time capsule - yet its simple narrative prevents it from feeling of its time.

Our lead becomes a folk hero of sorts, with an electro-bard (Cleavon Little’s DJ SuperSOul) imparting his story to the masses.

Lead actor Barry Neewman does not get a lot to do, but he is fine. At a certain point, it feels like the car is on screen longer than he is. They become fused as one and the same.

The character is not even involved in any particular quest for a higher goal - he is transporting a car cross country, and plans to deliver it ahead of schedule because he thinks he can (with a bet thrown in, of course).

The character is not checked out of society in the same way as others in the movie (religious groups, hippies, SuperSoul’s pirate radio station), but as the film progresses, his inscrutability becomes a blank canvas for struggling against the system.

The film had to shorten its shooting schedule and was affected by budget problems. These issues are probably partially influenced by the film’s near-abstract sense of momentum, and then increasingly opaque lead figure.

We get a few flashes of the protagonist’s past, but these snippets only increase his status as an elemental, mythic figure. Kowalski's past as a veteran, racing car driver and cop ties him to iconography of action and speed. His past career as a policeman feels like the ultimate rejection of society's norms - here is someone who used to work for the Man fighting the Man. He is Bullitt if he had chucked in his badge because he would not play ball with slick politico Chalmers (Robert Vaughn).

Only one character - at the very end of the movie - is able to recognise him from his past life, connecting an act of righteousness that unmoored him from the establishment, and set him on this final course.

The movie’s explosive ending is established by the opening sequence - a flash-forward that sets out Kowalski’s race as inherently doomed - feels like a metaphor for the shift from the optimism of the sixties to the new decade.

His ultimate escape is immolation. The movie ends, the character is dead, but in his sacrifice his legend is cemented.