Easy Rider

'Easy Rider' is much more than a 60s relic - it's still a great movie even today. I find it fascinating that Hopper and Fonda took Roger Corman material and gave it an arthouse approach influenced by Godard and the French New Wave. Combined with breathtaking visuals, a well chosen rock soundtrack and some classic, stoned, improvised dialogue this is still an impressive movie all these years later. Fonda had recently made 'The Wild Angels', Hopper the less remembered 'The Glory Stompers', and Jack Nicholson 'Hells Angels On Wheels', but 'Easy Rider' reinvented the biker movie, and things were never quite the same in Hollywood for the rest of the Seventies. The supporting cast is interesting and includes a great role for the fantastically underrated Luke Askew as the "Stranger on Highway", and cameos from the stars buddies Luana Anders ('Dementia 13') and Sabrina Scharf (Nicholson's love interest in 'Hells Angels On Wheels'), as well Karen Black and Toni Basil's New Orleans hookers, Phil Spector's coke snorting bit part, and a fleeting glimpse of a young Grizzly Adams. You either love this movie or you don't, and I'm most definitely in the former camp. A 1960s generation-defining counter-culture classic!

Over time, this rough diamond of a film has become a real gem in my collection. When I first saw it at the theater, I remember liking the anti-establishment attitude and the rock music soundtrack. Later, on T.V., I remember thinking what a great actor Jack Nicholson was...and how terribly low-budget the rest of the film appeared.

And now, over 30 years later....it's one of my favorite movies of all time. Peter Fonda tries to be Everyman....but he's really the most insecure individual of the group. His cathartic trip at the cemetary in New Orleans is embarrassingly honest to watch. His search is not for individual freedom...his search is for a family. And yet, he is always the outsider, the observer.

Dennis Hopper is the sidekick, the fool. And like a fool, he cannot hide his thoughts behind a socially acceptable demeanor. He constantly says exactly what he thinks. He has little patience for flower children, pretentious intellectuals, coy women, law officers, drunks in jail, or rednecks passing him on the road. Like a fool, he is doomed. Jack Nicholson is the core of the film. He does not appear until halfway through the bikers' odyssey, but the trip will not make sense until his face rises up from the jailhouse cot to peer bleary-eyed at his surroundings. He is the innocent man of this group....he is the AMERICAN. This movie is just another road picture, the way ON THE ROAD by Kerouac was just another travel book. This little counterculture movie is an American Classic.

I cannot overstate the importance of this movie in my personal development.

In 1969 I was eighteen and a freshman at Cambridge University. I was also a near-fundamentalist and a member of the Christian Union. Its officials decreed that Easy Rider was unsuitable for Christian viewing; I'd seen some enthusiastic reviews which made me curious. Moral and spiritual dilemma followed. To view or not to view? I prayed about it - look, this is a long time ago, right - and decided that if it had been OK for the Christian Union's leaders to see it, if only to realise it was morally dubious, then it was OK for me. They hadn't been corrupted, presumably; the Lord would see that I wasn't either.

So I went and it blew me away. I thought then and think now, that this is a magnificently perceptive commentary on hippie culture and one that only the medium of film can deliver. Naive idealism is weighed against the squalid reality of drugs (and indeed alcohol). Freedom is portrayed as often aimless, self-indulgent and downright boring. The underlying morality could be seen as puritanical: a celebration of the free-lovin' drop-out Sixties it ain't, more a weary end-of-decade critique thereof. I would have thought there was much to commend it to the Christian Union moralisers, yet as ever they couldn't see past the surface - drug abuse, loose women. Yet it has its high moments, in more ways than one, and is always a treat for the eyes.

My decision to defy the Christian Union by seeing the film was an early step out of my fundamentalist prison and I haven't stopped walking yet. No-one's ever going to tell me what I can and can't watch again: nor will I censor anyone else's viewing. I'm still a believer, but not of the kind that the Christian Union would have thought will ever go to heaven. Guess I'll have to live with that.

Easy Rider conveys one of the best feelings in the world - freedom, just being out there without big thoughts in the mind. And that's why Hopper and Fonder just get started on their machines. Without thinking too much. And catch a picture of the US, which is equally desirable and scary. Or, as the film puts it: "You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it." The question is, however, what has gone wrong since then. And, luckily, right too.

Two drifters, Wyatt "Captain America" (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) travel across the Southwestern and Southern United States with proceeds from a sale of cocaine to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana encountering various characters along the way with the more countercultural persons welcoming of the two while traditionalist meet the two with contempt or sometimes violence.

Easy Rider is a 1969 road drama directed and co-written by Dennis Hopper who also stars in the film alongside co-writer and producer Peter Fonda. During the 1960s thanks to the success of AIP films such as The Wild Angels, this led to the creation of the subgenre of the Biker film. Both Fonda and Hopper had appeared in AIP produced Biker films as well as the Roger Corman directed LSD film The Trip (written by Jack Nicholson who'd end up with a prominent role in the film). While initially intended to be an AIP film the company wanted the option to replace Hopper if the film went over budget and rejecting that condition Fonda took the project to Columbia Pictures who backed the project. The film became a sleeper hit not only scoring solid critical reviews and earning Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson (in his mainstream breakout performance), but the film became a sizable financial success as the fourth highest grossing film that year and along with that year's Midnight Cowboy is credited with jumpstarting the New Hollywood era of 70s filmmaking. The historical value of Easy Rider is something to be admired, even if I feel the movie works better as a time capsule of its time better more than a movie.

In terms of its subject matter, Easy Rider from its opening is very loose in terms of structure and flow operating with a more avant garde approach that's less focused on story and more on experience. With a very documentary-like approach to the material Hopper for the first ten minutes or so doesn't even have any introduction to the characters of Wyatt and Billy and it feels very much like we're dropped into the middle of things with the two going about their business as the audience is along for the ride. There is a sense of character and history between the two with Wyatt being more sentimental and optimistic in comparison to Billy's more cynical outlook on the world and the two function as sounding boards for which the various vignettes to play off against. Hopper captures the beauty of the roads in the American Southwest and South as well as the contemporary social attitudes of both the counterculture and the traditionalists who react to the two with contempt at best or violence at worst.

Easy Rider is one of those movies where you can't dispute its historical and artistic value because without its influence it's a sure bet the landscape of film would be considerably different. While I found the film fascinating for capturing a portrait of a certain time and place in a cinema verite fashion, the film itself ultimately left me somewhat cold by the end. I think it is still worth a viewing however especially for its historical value both for its contributions to cinema as well as its portrait of 1960s America.