Vanishing Point (1971) was on last night. Why was everyone not watching!!! Barry Newman stars as Kowalski, a guy who has been a good cop, a motorcycle racer and now transports cars to dealerships. It begins with him delivering a car to Denver, not to be swayed with liqueur or women, he immediately takes his next job...deliver a 1970 white Dodge Charger to San Francisco. Kowalski decides it must be there in 16 hours. Amped up on speed and total disregard for the law he motors his way through all sorts of obstacles. Kowalski is never in a major city, but only towns and long empty stretches of road. While outrunning the cops, a local radio station's blind disk jockey, Super Soul, becomes his champion. "The last American hero...the last beautiful free soul on this planet" he preaches. As Super Soul blast the airwaves in his one stop sign town, the camera will pan along dirt roads with almost no one listening.
The cops are after Kowalski, but it is not just about him against "the man", but him connecting to the machine and the machine driving past the vanishing point. There are all these shots of roadways outlining the great expanse of the west and inside the roadways, linear patterns cut through the asphalt. Because of a cop blockade, a city truck painting lines on the highway slowly paints a curve on a stretch of road with no turn in sight.
Kowalski barely says a word, but the engine is always on. The voice or the narrator is the blind DJ, piecing together events from a police scanner. At one point the charger leaves the road, and ventures off into the dessert abyss, the last piece of civilization and structure is now gone, reality is obscured as Kowalski will now, never leave the machine. He takes more speed to power himself powering the muscle car.
How does it end? There is really only one way and existential road movie can end.
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