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Christ on a bike, the last ride (cf. Anger's Scorpio Rising). Deal in the Mexican junkyard, sale under whooshing airplanes, fuel for the voyage from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid are shaggy ramblers split between Peter Fonda's glassy stare and Dennis Hopper's helter-skelter peepers, both of them "walkin' around with tombstones in their eyes." The dream of "doing your own thing in your own time" has a pit stop at the hippie commune: Seeds in the desert, a Giotto O at dinner, the hitchhiker (Luke Askew) who gravelly ponders the essence of Porky Pig. (The antiheroes are more interested in skinny dipping with local chicks, the place gets their blessing nonetheless.) The roaming urge as old as Huck Finn, or at least Ford's Monument Valley, chopper wheels are a lot like horseshoes, are they not? No room in the parade for them, the disciple behind bars is a gone-to-seed small-town lawyer who flies the coop in his football helmet. (Jack Nicholson's sweet-natured clowning clears the sanctimonious air, his liquid-breakfast toast shows the hand of Terry Southern: "To ol' D.H. Lawrence.") Flash cuts and zooms, Steppenwolf and Jimi Hendrix, landscape after landscape lyrically stretched by László Kovács' camera. Revelations under the stars, one puff of grass and the novice is monologuing about the Venusians. The redneck hamlet is a long way from Benedek's The Wild One, the Antonioni debt is repaid in Zabriskie Point. Out of the bordello and into Mardi Gras with Karen Black and Toni Basil and 16mm lenses, the Maya Deren pastiche at the graveyard is just the acid culmination for the decade's curdled orgy. A snapshot, une pièce d'époque, a eulogy. "Your time's running out, man." "I'm hip about time." Counterculture's promise can't compete with a gas tank full of loot, up in smoke it all goes on the side of the road. With Warren Finnerty, Luana Anders, Robert Walker Jr., and Phil Spector.
--- Fernando F. Croce |