Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hopper
Writers: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

Well, here’s the gamechanger, the film that made Jack Nicholson a star, even though he’s not in it for as long as I remembered and then not until almost halfway. His role here landed him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, a real wake-up call to someone who had been writing and producing films to diversify after a decade of bit parts and B-movies.

It’s been fascinating to watch him grow as an actor, from the weak lead of The Cry Baby Killer and The Wild Ride to entertaining support in The Broken Land and Flight to Fury to the best thing about the movie in Back Door to Hell and Hells Angels on Wheels.

It’s also been fascinating to see so much of those earlier movies combining here. It’s like he was waiting for the counterculture to show up to see what he could do. This film too feels like the natural child of acid westerns like The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, outlaw biker movies like Hells Angels on Wheels and drug movies like Psych-Out and Head.

And, given that it also arguably began the New Hollywood movement by grossing $60m on an indie budget ($400k plus $1m for music rights) and bringing the counterculture to the mainstream, it was the perfect moment to end Nicholson’s sixties output and set him up for an astoundingly successful seventies.

The major names here are Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. They’re the two leads and they co-wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern. Fonda produced and Hopper directed, winning at Cannes for the Best Film by a New Director. This is their film, but it’s Nicholson’s character who serves as the heart of the movie.

There’s a running theme that, wherever the two leads, Wyatt and Billy, happen to be, they can’t get a place to stay, being bikers. So they camp a lot and it’s during one of the campfire scenes that the truth comes out.

Billy thinks that people are scared of them because they’re bikers. George, a drunk lawyer played by Nicholson, begs to differ. “They’re not scared of you,” he states. “They’re scared of what you represent to them.” “It’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” “Don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are.” “They see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.”

And, really, that’s what this film is. The two leads start out making a lot of money bringing drugs from Mexico to Los Angeles, selling it to Phil Spector of all people, then pop the money into sealed tubes they conceal in the gas tank of Fonda’s stars and stripes covered bike.

And off they ride, from L.A. to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras parade, experiencing the U.S. in a variety of forms as they go, all shot beautifully by László Kovács, last seen on Hells Angels on Wheels and Psych-Out. So many of the crew had been involved in earlier Nicholson pictures, but none had such a huge role here.

In fact, for a while, it seems like there isn’t a plot to follow, because the scenery takes over, from California to Arizona to Utah. When I last saw this film in 2004, I’d just moved to Arizona and hadn’t seen any of this scenery; now I’ve experienced much of this majesty off screen.

Even then, though, it didn’t take Monument Valley to demonstrate that this was a modern western. A fantastic early shot includes Wyatt fixing a flat tyre on his bike behind a rancher shoeing a horse. It’s a baton pass of a scene, the ape’s club and orbiting nuclear platform from 2001: A Space Odyssey without a cut.

If there’s a plot, it manifests through these encounters and especially through the pair of companions they pick up along the way.

The first is an unnamed hitch-hiking hippie they take to a commune. They stay for a little while and enjoy their hospitality, as they did at the Arizona ranch, albeit not only with food this time. The hippies enjoy free love and one thinks that Wyatt is beautiful.

It’s telling that our bikers are out of place in both cultures, Wyatt and Billy being deliberate choices of outlaw name, but they’re welcomed there, a rare thing in exploitation flicks about outlaw bikers. Both cultures are also free, the quintessentially white American rancher wed to a Catholic Mexican who’s borne him a lot of children. While it’s never given voice, at every point, the film asks us if this is America. It is.

The second is George, who they meet in jail. He’s a regular in the drunk tank. Wyatt and Billy are charged with parading without a license, having breezed into a small town in New Mexico and joined in the fun. While the people of America may be down with different ways of living, the Man certainly isn’t.

And not all the people of America are quite so tolerant as ranchers and hippies. To get to New Orleans, they have to travel through the deepsouth and things turn dark very quickly. Once they start seeing Spanish moss on trees, they also start attracting unwelcome attention in restaurants. They leave a Louisiana diner to avoid trouble but it comes for them that night in the form of clubs while they sleep. George never wakes up and that’s it for Nicholson.

It’s really not a huge role if we count screen minutes, though it’s far more substantial than his roles in Too Soon to Love, Ensign Pulver or The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He’s utterly pivotal to the movie though, that prophetic campfire speech defining it. He’s also an establishment figure for them, not just a lawyer but one from a prominent family, which is why his drug of choice is alcohol. He travels with them and they introduce him to marijuana.

Nicholson is very good here indeed, as the reality check for the leads. Peter Fonda is cool and open as Wyatt. Dennis Hopper is paranoid and jumpy as Billy. Nicholson grounds them in confident style. There’s a wonderful shot after Billy threatens him and he just yawns.

Of course, Wyatt and Billy carry on without him and pay tribute to him in New Orleans but they don’t get much further than the weird trip they experience in a cemetery there. This is just as much an acid western as The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Death is waiting.

I thought I knew how important Easy Rider was in 2004, but I see so much more now after a couple of decades more film exploration. It feels now like this was inevitable and the clues were neatly telegraphed in Nicholson’s earlier films. It took them and ran with them and, in doing so, birthed the seventies. This was when the studios realised they’d lost the plot. They didn’t find it again until Jaws in 1975.