Yeah, man (Easy Rider (DVD))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Easy Rider (DVD)
Date:	27/11/01 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everything, (and no mention of Rugby whatsoever)

Disadvantages: Nothing

'Easy Rider' is the best film made in the Sixties.

I'm just throwing that one in to make sure I get some comments from fellow film fans. I will accept votes for 'The Wild Bunch', 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'Lawrence of Arabia, but 'Easy Rider' is the one that makes it for me. It's a fairly plotless film, with some variable performances around the fringes (though a quartet of superb ones at the centre), the direction is sometimes too loose, and there are moments (particularly when Billy starts tripping out on LSD) when the film-makers are experimenting too self-consciously.

But you can't get beyond it - before this film, you couldn' talk about drugs, sex, violence with any kind of reality. You had to be tied down to a story, to rigid moral values, to a specific kind of film-making that involved studios and rules and procedures. 'Easy Rider' was created by the spoiled brat son of a Hollywood God (Peter Fonda) and a barely sane burnout who had been in Hollywood for more than a decade, and achieved nothing (Dennis Hopper) who effectively took a camera and micro-crew and made a film about the world as they saw it - alienated people making a film about alienation and dislocation, and exploding the Hollywood system in the process.

Billy (Hopper) and Captain America (Fonda) do a massive drug deal, and head off onto the highways of America on their Harleys to spend their money, and take some of their supply. On the road, they meet a disaffected laywer (Nicholson) and plenty of rednecks. They are rejected, harassed and abused as they travel, ending up at hippy communes, shabby towns and deserts. That's about it for plot.

What 'Easy Rider' manages to do is look at a country which is gradually ripping itself to pieces - the breakdown of certainties, the scars of Vietnam, the gulf between young and old - without setting out to be a great film, or a great statement. Sh
ot guerilla-style, it's often staggeringly beautiful (the cinematography, largely a matter of improvisation informed by great skill, was done by Laszlo Kovacs) - it's also extremely well-edited. After the deal is done with a drug dealer played by music producer Phil Spector, the title sequence, shots of the men on their bikes cut to the sound of Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild', is one of the most exhilarating sequences in cinema history. Now, the use of pop music to establish the mood and rhythm of a scene is second nature: Martin Scorsese makes whole films without a bespoke soundtrack, just using pop songs like Hopper and Fonda invented it here.

'Easy Rider' seems to operate on its own set of rules, quite apart from the rigid structures of standard movies from the period. The freedom, the exuberance of Nicholson's outrageous performance, the casual coolness of Fonda, it's different from before. The realism of the forties and fifties was still stylised, ritualised and fundamentally melodramatic (the films of Nick Ray are a notable exception). 'Easy Rider' crackles with an almost accidental flavour of reality. People talk and act in a realistic way, while their stories deliberately reject the neatness, the wrapped-upness of most movies.

While some developments (the ending in particular) smack of a rather studied cynicism, even cynicism is new and exciting following a decade when Doris Day and Rock Hudson were stars, and 'The Sound of Music' was the biggest film of all time. Hopper and Fonda didn't know they were setting themselves up to be icons and poster images for all time, but each gives a magnificent performance (Rip Torn is excellent as well). However, the film belongs to Nicholson; having played everything from a masochist in the original 'Little Shop of Horrors' to a beatnik in 'Dr Kildare' (he shared an episode with William Shatner of all people), Nicholson grabbed his
one (possibly final) chance and became the biggest actor of the Seventies.

Without the freedom to break out and make their own movies, people like Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, Alan J. Pakula and Paul Schrader would probably have stayed in television, or making movies for Roger Corman. Even John Cassavettes, a determined social realist film-maker and pioneer of improvisation (Scorsese's mentor) didn't make this much impact, despite making 'Shadows' in 1959.

Ironically, it was only Nicholson that really made it - Hopper's career has swung around with more lows than highs, while Fonda achieved nothing until a handful of recent quality character performances. But who cares? Thirty years after 'Easy Rider' it the road, we could still do with films as adventurous and exciting as this.

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