Easy Rider (1969)
You can't take this movie at the same level as other Hollywood films, even from the same period. It's a low budget paean to the counterculture, and it plays itself out perfectly, with boredom and imperfection and without idealizing. This is huge. Here are a couple of bikers on the road, and things go wrong, and they meet up with some ordinary and less than savory folk, and they are less than admirable themselves.
In other words, some reality here, and the movie was released 30 days before Woodstock, which is a kind of final rallying cry to the starry eyed (thank god) and a warning, in a way, that having too simple an idea of a new future is dangerous.
Literally.
Maybe the most telling moment in the film (and no accident that it's there) is the Mexican-American family toward the beginning, where they are living, successfully, on the land. They have traditional values (they pray, they have respect) and they are happy. Later, a commune of city kids, disillusioned young people who only want the best in the world, tries for the same thing, and they are clearly going to fail. It won't rain, they don't know what they are doing, they are acting only on ideas.
So it is with our two bikers played by Peter Fonda and director Dennis Hopper (and for awhile, their tagalong lawyer in the form of Jack Nicholson). They are blindly hoping that they are in touch with a new order, a freedom that is so obvious and justified it can't be wrong. The drugs, the rednecks, the beatings, the disaster, are all naturally enough, too, but not in the idealism of their roadtrip. I think this is the 60s in a nutshell. It's not a great movie, but it's a great reflection on the times. And it's a very good movie, engrossing if you don't demand too much from it. Utterly significant.
You can't take this movie at the same level as other Hollywood films, even from the same period. It's a low budget paean to the counterculture, and it plays itself out perfectly, with boredom and imperfection and without idealizing. This is huge. Here are a couple of bikers on the road, and things go wrong, and they meet up with some ordinary and less than savory folk, and they are less than admirable themselves.
In other words, some reality here, and the movie was released 30 days before Woodstock, which is a kind of final rallying cry to the starry eyed (thank god) and a warning, in a way, that having too simple an idea of a new future is dangerous.
Literally.
Maybe the most telling moment in the film (and no accident that it's there) is the Mexican-American family toward the beginning, where they are living, successfully, on the land. They have traditional values (they pray, they have respect) and they are happy. Later, a commune of city kids, disillusioned young people who only want the best in the world, tries for the same thing, and they are clearly going to fail. It won't rain, they don't know what they are doing, they are acting only on ideas.
So it is with our two bikers played by Peter Fonda and director Dennis Hopper (and for awhile, their tagalong lawyer in the form of Jack Nicholson). They are blindly hoping that they are in touch with a new order, a freedom that is so obvious and justified it can't be wrong. The drugs, the rednecks, the beatings, the disaster, are all naturally enough, too, but not in the idealism of their roadtrip. I think this is the 60s in a nutshell. It's not a great movie, but it's a great reflection on the times. And it's a very good movie, engrossing if you don't demand too much from it. Utterly significant.