Steven Spielberg (1974)
This was Steven Spielberg’s first cinema feature but his television work – especially the 1971 TV movie Duel – had already attracted attention. In Duel, a psychotic tanker truck-driver repeatedly tries to run a car driver (Dennis Weaver) off the road. It’s possible to see a dual duel in the film: although the motorist eventually wins out, it’s the Peterbilt 281 truck, rather than Dennis Weaver, that is widely regarded as the star of the show.
In The Sugarland Express, based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1969, Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) visits her husband Clovis (William Atherton) in prison. Even though Clovis has only four more months to serve, she browbeats him into escaping without further ado, in order that they can retrieve their infant son. Lou Jean herself has just come out of jail; while she and Clovis were both inside, the child has been with foster parents in the Texan town of Sugar Land[1]. The Poplins initially hitch a ride with an elderly couple but, when a patrolman (Michael Sacks) stops the car (to warn the old man for travelling dangerously slowly), Lou Jean and Clovis panic and drive off in it. After crashing the car, they’re apprehended by the patrolman but manage to take him hostage and resume their journey in his vehicle. Over the next few hours, they’re pursued by an ever-lengthening caravan of police cars and news vans, with helicopters overhead and Texan crowds lining the route to Sugar Land by way of (according to Wikipedia) Beaumont, Dayton, Houston, Cleveland, Conroe and Wheelock. In other words, the principal characters in the story, as in Duel, compete for attention with motor vehicles. Again, the human beings are upstaged.
In retrospect, this opposition – and the balance of power between people and machines – clearly say plenty about Steven Spielberg as a film-maker. The Sugarland Express may be a human interest story to an extent unusual in his oeuvre but the movie is character-driven in more ways than one, and remarkable chiefly for its twenty-seven-year-old director’s precocious technical assurance. Although it’s easy to understand why Sugarland made a big impact in 1974, this was a debut feature of an unusually well-supported kind. The producers were Richard Zanuck and David Brown. Zanuck had had a major production role on The Sound of Music. Brown was an executive producer on The Sting which, like The Sound of Music, won the Oscar for Best Picture (in the very week that The Sugarland Express appeared in American cinemas). The two men had acquired the screen rights for what would be Spielberg’s next picture, Jaws. The cinematographer was Vilmos Zsigmond, who had shot three Robert Altman films (Images, McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Long Goodbye) as well as John Boorman’s Deliverance and Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow. The music was by the already very experienced John Williams. It’s fair to say that Spielberg shows compositional and narrative abilities beyond his years in The Sugarland Express. It’s also fair to say he had the kind of back-up that few rookie directors enjoy.
There are good documentary elements in the art direction (by Joe Alves), even if Spielberg tends to over-emphasise a few of the commercial landmarks. The editing (Edward M Abroms and Verna Fields) is sharp. The shots of the posse of police vehicles, particularly at dusk with their headlights on, make them beautifully sinister. John Williams’s score is very pleasant. The film is less sure and more forced when it comes to people – although the screenplay, by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, may be as much to blame as the direction. At least for this viewer, coming to The Sugarland Express for the first time four decades on, it compares poorly with the following year’s Dog Day Afternoon – which was also based on a recent real-life crime. The two films share several common features: the protagonists are meant to be engaging, through a combination of their incompetence and their motives for breaking the law; their crime quickly becomes a news story; onlookers take their side. Sidney Lumet, Al Pacino and John Cazale make the bank robbers Sonny and Sal much more compellingly individual than Lou Jean and Clovis are. It seems par-for-the-course when this couple on the run and their hostage get to like each other. The same is true of the lionisation of the Poplins by the roadside crowds. Pauline Kael compared the latter to the crowds in Preston Sturges films, particularly The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, but there’s no sense in Sugarland of the inherent fickleness of public opinion, which is so essential to the Sturges view.
Goldie Hawn’s performance as Lou Jean was probably overrated because the role was dramatically meatier than those she’d played before. She’s all right but the promise of Lou Jean’s determined walk from the bus to the prison at the start of the film isn’t fulfilled. You sense throughout the actress’s awareness that she’s doing something different from what she’s done previously, though some of her comedy bits are not ditz-free. Spielberg wasn’t mature enough as a director of actors to help Hawn with this (and he’s rarely shown a deft comic touch). William Atherton is good as Clovis and Michael Sacks more than adequate as the captive patrolman but there’s not a lot of natural rhythm in the exchanges among the three principals. The cast also includes Ben Johnson as the Texan Department of Public Safety captain conducting negotiations with the fugitives and planning how to bring their escapade to an end. Because of what Steven Spielberg went on to achieve, The Sugarland Express has a place in Hollywood history. How much you like it, though, probably depends finally on your appetite for expertly choreographed car chases and crashes. One of the roadside signs the camera dwells on reads ‘SUGARLAND AUTO WRECKING’. Too right.
4 June 2016
[1] The place shows up as two words on a Google search.
