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North by Northwest's crop-duster sequence is the model of construction, Steven Spielberg the avid novice tries the limits of television in a feature-length dilation. Out of the dark of a Los Angeles garage and into the sun-blasted wilderness, for the opening credits the camera is mounted on a bumper so that the vehicular POV passes through a tunnel as though lifting off toward lunar terrain. Nothing to do on the road but get locked in macho games, thus the henpecked salesman (Dennis Weaver) in his red Plymouth Valiant against a rusty 18-wheeler. Not just any truck, a smoke-belching leviathan with blasting horn and jaundiced headlights, its driver just a pair of pointy cowboy boots and a burly forearm waving the alarmed protagonist into traffic. So emasculated he can't even ask a waitress for ketchup, the besieged traveler totters into a diner to contemplate the Hitchcockian fragility of order: "All the ropes that kept you hanging in there get cut loose... And there you are, right back in the jungle." Richard Matheson's Borges-heavy teleplay distills the situation to rock, asphalt, sky and frazzled face, Spielberg turns it into a tremendous manual of technique—sprawling tracks and kinetic montage, wide angles and jump cuts, subjective inserts and slow-motion, every tool gets a workout. (Even before the extended chase, Weaver is already trapped in a deep-focus composition, at the payphone with car and rig in the background and the glassy iris of a washing-machine window in the foreground.) A cunning mise en scène of rear-view mirrors and dashboard dials, the human radiator that sputters and boils on the way to the precipice. "Okay. Let's see you catch me now." The Sugarland Express is a screwball continuation, though shark and dinosaur also proceed from this desert. Cinematography by Jack A. Marta.
--- Fernando F. Croce |