Damnation Alley (1977)

Damnation Alley is a low-key 1977 post-apocalypse science fiction movie. Perhaps a bit too low-key.

The movie was based on a novel by Roger Zelazny which he expanded from an earlier novella.

It start with an all-out nuclear war. The men of the 123rd Strategic Missile Wing have survived, at least until another disaster strikes. Four survivors set off on a cross-country journey to Albany, because that’s the only place from which they’ve ever picked up radio signals indicating that there might be other survivors. Denton calls the route to Albany, which skirts areas of high radioactivity, Damnation Alley.

The nuclear war has tilted the Earth’s axis, sending the weather totally crazy. The sky is filled with auroras and radioactive clouds.

They make their journey in two top-secret armoured Landmaster vehicles, which are kind of like a cross between an SUV, a tank and a motorhome. They’re kind of cool, sort of.

In a post-apocalyptic movie you expect roaming bands of mutants but you don’t get that in this movie. In fact the crew of the Landmaster encounter very few humans of any kind. The dangers they face come mostly from the hostile environment.

There are very few action scenes, which again is not what you expect in this genre. The major hazards of post-apocalyptic life seem to be bugs. Gigantic scorpions and armoured cockroaches, that sort of thing.

There is an encounter with radiation-scarred hillbillies.

Four men set off on this journey, some die and two extra passengers are picked up. There’s Billy, a frightened teenaged boy. And there’s Janice (Dominique Sanda), a showgirl they find in an abandoned casino in Las Vegas.

The special effects are at times a bit iffy but this was a 70s movie and I tend to think of iffy special effects as a feature rather than a bug. And it has to be said that the killer cockroaches are very well done and very scary. And the weird skies give this movie a distinctive feel - you really do get the impression that the nuclear war changed absolutely everything and that the world is now a very disturbing place.

The encounter with those killer roaches in Salt Lake City is certainly the highlight of the movie. It’s extremely well shot, it’s creepy and it’s scary.

This was a major studio big-budget production. The visuals (such as the weird skies) are quite impressive. There’s some fine location shooting. But this is a movie that bears little resemblance to Star Wars, which the studio had in production at the same time. There are no epic battle scenes. Damnation Alley had a troubled production history with numerous script rewrites. The original concept was very ambitious but the film fell victim to constant budget cuts. The original cut of the movie was much much longer and included more action scenes and a romantic triangle sub-plot which was eliminated entirely. Which is a pity, since it meant that Janice becomes a minor character and it also has the effect of making the uneasy relationship between Denton and Tanner less interesting.

The main attraction here will be the two leads, George Peppard and Jan-Michael Vincent. Peppard was always fun and enjoyed huge success on television in the 70s and 80s with Banacek and The A-Team. He has a southern accent in this movie, or at least he thinks he’s doing a southern accent. Peppard plays Major Denton, a bit of a martinet who still clings to the military mindset. Jan-Michael Vincent is Tanner. Denton used to be his commanding officer. Tanner was always out of place in the military and he’s a good-natured rebel. Vincent later starred in Airwolf on TV.

As a result of the many script rewrites and the fact that about 45 minutes was cut from the film by the studio the characters feel undeveloped. We never find out what is really bugging Denton. We never find out why Tanner is a rebel or why he and Denton have such a tense relationship. We don’t really get to know Janice. And unfortunately the movie doesn’t have quite enough action or excitement to compensate for the thin characterisations.

Signal One’s Blu-Ray release includes two audio commentaries (plus loads of other extras). I only listened to one of the commentaries, the one with Paul Talbot. He gives an enormous amount of fascinating information about the history of the movie from the time the film rights were bought in 1970 to the time it was finally released in 1977 and he offers plenty of insights into how various effects were achieved. The 16:9 enhanced transfer looks very good (the movie was shot in the 2.35:1 aspect ration which director Jack Smight uses effectively).

There’s also a US Blu-Ray release, from Shout! Factory.

Damnation Alley clearly should have turned out to be a better movie. The potential was there. It just doesn’t really engage the viewer. We don’t get interested in the characters because all the scenes that offered us insights into their emotions and motivations seem to have been ruthlessly cut by the studio. As it stands it’s still not really a bad movie, certainly better than its reputation would suggest, but a bit flat. Worth a look.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Vanishing Point is a 1971 road movie, a genre for which I have some fondness. It’s a few other things as well, some good and some bad, as we shall see.

It was a fairly low-budget movie, directed by Richard C. Sarafian, and it gained quite a cult following which to some extent it still retains.

There’s virtually no plot. Kowalski (Barry Newman) is a former cop and former racing driver who now makes his living delivering cars cross-country. Having just finished one gruelling delivery he immediately embarks on another, delivering a souped-up Dodge Challenger from Colorado to San Francisco. He makes a bet with his drug dealer that he can deliver the car in fifteen hours, which is apparently impossible but Kowalski is so full of speed he figures he can do it anyway.

Not surprisingly he infringes a few traffic laws along the way but he’s in a hurry so he outruns the Highway Patrol. Eventually there’s a massive manhunt across four states to catch him, even though he’s been guilty of nothing other than a few traffic violations. You see the Establishment is out to get him because he’s a Rebel. He just wants to be free, man, and the Establishment won’t let him.

He forms some kind of crazy telepathic bond with a hyped-up blind black DJ (played by Cleavon Little) known as Super Soul. Super Soul offers him advice over the airwaves but Kowalski seems to hear the messages whether his radio is turned on or not. Super Soul is not just giving him advice on evading the cops but also acts as a kind of spiritual guru.

Kowalski has a few adventures along the way - a race with an E-Type Jaguar, an encounter with two very fey carjackers, a meeting with a crazy old man in the desert who collects rattlesnakes for a living, a meeting with some Jesus Freaks and a friendly biker who offers advice and drugs. And there’s also a nude girl on a motorcycle.

Kowalski also has flashbacks to pivotal events in his life, such as his girlfriend’s death and the events which got him kicked out of the police force.

Vanishing Point starts off pretty well. The first half of the movie is mostly high-speed car chase stuff and the stunt driving was quite superb by the standards of the day and still holds up pretty well (and has the advantage of being much more realistic and plausible than later car chase movies).

Then we get to the halfway point and it all falls apart. It starts to get into hippie-dippie counter-culture stuff and becomes unbearably pretentious and dull. All the excitement disappears and the pace slows to a crawl. And we get some quasi-mystical nonsense as well as some incredibly heavy-handed political stuff that serves no purpose other than reinforcing the whole “the evil Establishment wants to stifle our free expression” vibe.

Even the nude girl on the motorcycle is unlikely to keep you awake during the movie’s second half.

Barry Newman’s performance is odd but effective. Much of the time Kowalski is just staring into space and we wonder if he can even see the road. Maybe he’s not seeing it with his eyes but with his soul, man. It’s a performance that works within the context of the film. The rest of the acting is ham-fisted and generally embarrassingly obvious.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s screenplay is mostly just incoherent and self-indulgent. I think the movie is trying to say something about different planes of existence and how the material world is just one of those planes.

John Alonzo’s cinematography is at times quite stunning.

Director Richard C. Sarafian handles the action sequences extremely well and that’s the most positive thing I can say about his directing.

This move has been given a luxury two-disc Blu-Ray release which includes both the US theatrical version and the British theatrical release (which is apparently even longer which is a truly horrifying thought since the US version is already way too long). There’s an audio commentary by the director.

If you’re looking for a 1970s road movie that is actually worth seeing, watch Two-Lane Blacktop instead.

Another movie similar in style to Vanishing Point but which does the arty road trip thing much more successfully and is much more worth seeing is Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle (with Marianne Faithfull).

If you liked Easy Rider you’ll probably like this film. For me it was just too pretentious and too pseudo-mystical and too long and too boring and I can’t recommend it.

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

The first things that one has to to say about Jack Cardiff’s 1968 Anglo-French co-production Girl on a Motorcycle are that it’s arty, it’s pretentious, it’s slow, and it’s very very 1960s. If those things turn you off, don’t even bother with this movie. On the other hand if (like me) you happen to enjoy 60s movies that are arty, pretentious and slow then you’re in for a treat. 

Marianne Faithfull stars as Rebecca, a young woman who is engaged to be married to a very nice young school teacher named Raymond, but who is also hopelessly obsessed with another man, Daniel (Alain Delon). Daniel also teaches, but he isn’t a nice respectable young man. He is however devilishly handsome and very sexy, and he treats society’s rules with contempt. And he rides a motorcycle. A very big, very macho motorcycle, which he presents to Rebecca as a wedding present. 

After a short period of wedded bliss, which turns out to be not very blissful and extremely boring, Rebecca hops on her bike and sets out on a road trip to find Daniel. Most of the movie takes the form of her memories of past events, her daydreams, her imaginings of future happiness and her slightly kinky sexual fantasies. Rebecca is a woman who wants more out of life. She isn’t sure exactly what it is she wants, but she just knows she wants more. She wants to feel alive. Riding her bike makes her feel alive. Bad boy Daniel makes her feel alive. Raymond makes her feel dead. 

Marianne Faithfull might not be a great actress in the conventional sense, but she’s perfect for the role and she’s very effective. It’s a sympathetic and very erotic performance that avoids the potential pitfalls of making the character overly precious or whiney. Alain Delon doesn’t have much to do other than look gorgeous, sexy and dangerous, but he does that very well. 

Jack Cardiff was not only a good director, he was also a cinematographer of genius, and the movie is visually stunning. Some of the techniques he used seem very dated and very 60s now, such as the solarisation used in the sex scenes, but they’re actually quite effective. And it did allow him to include sex scenes that the censor would not otherwise have allowed him to get away with. It didn’t do him any good when it came to a US release though – the movie was still cut to ribbons there. Censors never have liked films that show women taking control of their sex lives, and the sight of a naked Marianne Faithfull was apparently considered much too dangerous for US audiences. 

The solarisation gives the movie a trippy feel that I rather enjoy. It’s also a great example of old-fashioned movie-making, where technical problems (such as the fact that Miss Faithfull could not ride a motorcycle but her character has to spend most of the movie riding one) had to be solved by skill and ingenuity rather than money and CGI. 

I’ve heard reports that the Region 2 DVD release is rather disappointing in terms of image quality. There are no such problems with the Region 4 DVD – the movie looks fabulous, the colours look sensational, and there’s a superb commentary track by director Jack Cardiff. It’s one of those movies that really needs a commentary track. Cardiff was clearly immensely proud of this film. He describes it as a stream-of-consciousness movie and that’s a pretty fair summary of it. If you love off-beat quirky arty movies, and if you like movies that focus on women, then this one is worth checking out. And the scenes with Rebecca on her motorcycle on the autobahn, where she is going as close to having sex with a motorcycle as a person can possibly go, really are extraordinarily erotic.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

With Easy Rider having made bucketloads of money for Columbia in 1969 Universal must have thought they were going to enjoy a similar bonanza with Two-Lane Blacktop. With a plot involving drifters challenging each other to a cross-country road race across America, with a cast headed by major youth culture icons (singer James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson), and with a director who’d started his career making movies for Roger Corman it seemed to have all the credentials to clean up in the exploitation, youth and counter-culture markets. The only trouble was, director Monte Hellman was not interested in delivering a movie packed with spectacular car crashes and explosions. Two-Lane Blacktop has no explosions, no shoot-outs, on fact no violence at all, no nudity, and the only sex takes place off-screen. The movie Hellman actually made is a bleak and incredibly austere existential road movie.

James Taylor (The Driver) and Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic) have no interests in life outside of their 1955 Chevy coupe, a car that they have turned into an awesomely fast racing machine. They make a living by racing and by challenging suckers who think they can beat their car. They are in effect car hustlers. At a diner The Girl (Laurie Bird) joins them. They keep encountering a bright yellow Pontiac GTO, whose driver (known to us only as GTO and played by Warren Oates) seems anxious to take them on. Eventually a formal challenge is issued - a race to Washington DC, with the winner to get the loser’s car.

That might make it sound like the plot is fairly important, but it isn’t. In fact the race scarcely matters, and neither side seems to take it very seriously. At times they’re more like allies than rivals, united perhaps by the understanding that they’re all outsiders and they’re all equally in love with the road. You might also expect a major romantic sub-plot involving The Girl, but again Hellman defies our expectations. All three male characters have at least a passing interest in sleeping with her, and one of them does, but the romantic angle ends up being as vague as the race itself. Nothing really matters except the road. None of the characters knows where the road is taking them, and they don’t seem to care. One moment they’re heading for Florida, the next it’s Arizona. The road is in fact a road to nowhere, and the characters seem aware of this.

Using non-actors for three of the four main roles (Laurie Bird was a photographer who only appeared in two further movies before her tragically early death) works extremely well. The performances are disconnected and detached, and devoid of emotional content. Which is exactly as it should be. We know nothing at all about the four characters. We don’t know their names, or where they come from. And they tell us nothing bout themselves. The only one who talks about himself is GTO, and we soon realise that we cannot believe a single word he says. His stories about himself are simply stories about other people that he’s picked up on the road from passengers he’s picked up. The lack of any kind of characterisation would be a flaw in most movies, but this movie is about the road, not the people on it.

It’s a movie that succeeds in being quintessentially American, and yet the sensibility behind it is European rather than American. Although made by Americans it has the feel of a film by a Bergman or an Antonioni or a Godard. Hellman and his screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer manage to view America in the kind of dispassionate way that is generally possible to outsiders. And they succeeded in making one of the greatest American movies of the 70s, the greatest decade in the history of American cinema. A magnificent film.