Easy Rider (1969)

"atfsgeoff" (atfsgeoff) 09/03/2019 at 00:00 • Filed to: None

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Just watched this 50 year old movie for the first time.

I was lied-to. This is not a motorcycle movie. This is a drug movie that happens to have motorcycles in it. It also has the main characters acting like dicks, perpetually high and/or drunk, showing up unannounced at various private residences like they own the place, and they don’t even have riding skills worth a damn, d uck-walking their machines everywhere.

Oh and there was a random murder, with an unceremonious disposal of the body. Then some prostitutes and a weird drug-fueled montage. Then two more random murders.

I don’t know what this movie is trying to convey, except Drugs = F reedom, and all squares are murderers and bigots.

Two thumbs down, would not watch again

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 00:21

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ive always felt the ending was just wierd and pointless

the soundtracks nice tho 

RacinBob > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 00:21

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It’s the 60's. it would make more sense if you were around then. Not that I agree but a  lot fewer pe ople and a lot few er rules. Ok oppo, am I right?

ttyymmnn > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 00:21

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Vincent Canby’s review (NYT) from 1969.

“EASY RIDER,” which opened yesterday at the Beekman, is a motorcycle drama with decidedly superior airs about it. How else are we to approach a movie that advertises itself: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere”? Right away you know that something superior is up, that somebody is making a statement, and you can bet your boots (cowboy, black leather) that it’s going to put down the whole rotten scene. What scene? Whose? Why? Man, I can’t tell you if you don’t know. What I mean to say is, if you don’t groove, you don’t groove. You might as well split. I felt this way during the first half-hour of “Easy Rider,” and then, almost reluctantly, fell into the rhythm of the determinedly inarticu late piece. Two not-so-young cyclists, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) who affects soft leather breeches and a Capt. America jacket, and Billy (Dennis Hopper), who looks like a perpetually stoned Buffalo Bill, are heading east from California toward New Orleans. They don’t communicate with us, or each other, but after a while, it doesn’t seem to matter. They simply exist—they are bizarre comic strip characters with occasional balloons over their heads reading: “Like you’re doing your thing,” or some such. We accept them in their moving isolation, against the magnificent Southwestern landscapes of beige and green and pale blue. They roll down macadam highways that look like black velvet ribbons, under skies of incredible purity, and the soundtrack rocks with oddly counterpointed emotions of Steppenwolf, the Byrds, the Electric Prunes — dark and smoky cries for liberation. Periodically, like a group taking a break, the cyclists stop (and so does the music) for quiet encounters—with a toothless rancher and his huge, happy family or with a commune of thin hippies, whose idyll seems ringed with unacknowledged desperation. Suddenly, however, a strange thing happens. There comes on the scene a very real character and everything that has been accepted earlier as a sort of lyrical sense impression suddenly looks flat and foolish. Wyatt and Billy are in a small Southern town—in jail for having disturbed the peace of a local parade—when they meet fellow-in-mate George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), a handsome, alcoholic young lawyer of good family and genially bad habits, a man whose only defense against life is a cheerful but not abject acceptance of it. As played by Nicholson, George Hanson is a marvelously realized character, who talks in a high, squeaky Southern accent and uses a phrase like “Lord have mercy!” the way another man might use a four-letter word. Hanson gets the cyclists sprung from jail and then promptly joins them. He looks decidedly foolish, sitting on the back of Wyatt’s bike, wearing a seersucker jacket and his old football helmet, but he is completely happy and, ironically, the only person in the movie who seems to have a sense of what liberation and freedom are. There is joy and humor and sweetness when he smokes grass for the first time and expounds an elaborate theory as to how the Venutians have already conquered the world. Nicholson is so good, in fact, that “Easy Rider” never quite recovers from his loss, even though he has had the rather thankless job of spelling out what I take to be the film’s statement (upper case). This has to do with the threat that people like the nonconforming Wyatt and Billy represent to the ordinary, self-righteous, inhibited folk that are the Real America. Wyatt and Billy, says the lawyer, represent freedom; ergo, says the film, they must be destroyed. If there is any irony in this supposition, I was unable to detect it in the screenplay written by Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern. Wyatt and Billy don’t seem particularly free, not if the only way they can face the world is through a grass curtain. As written and played, they are lumps of gentle clay, vacuous, romantic symbols, dressed in cycle drag. ” Easy Rider,” the first film to be directed by Dennis Hopper, won a special prize at this year’s Cannes festival as the best picture by a new director (there was only one other picture competing in that category). With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things — the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America. These things not only are continually compelling but occasionally they dazzle the senses, if not the mind. Hopper, Fonda and their friends went out into America looking for a movie and found instead a small, pious statement (upper case) about our society (upper case), which is sick (upper case). It’s pretty but lower case cinema.

atfsgeoff > RacinBob 09/03/2019 at 00:29

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You are absolutely correct, I was born 15 years after this movie came out so I have no first-hand knowledge or experience of the 1960s. But frankly, if this movie is in any way representative of reality, I’m glad I missed it.

ttyymmnn > RacinBob 09/03/2019 at 00:29

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I think you are right. It is very much a film of its era, and one that must be viewed in its time. It  does not transcend that era. It might make more sense today as a historical document.

lone_liberal > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 00:31

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It must have been a movie of its time because it was extremely dated 30 years ago when I first saw it too. It does have the “Hey Mickey” woman, Toni Basil, in it as a prostitute.

HFV has no HFV. But somehow has 2 motorcycles > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 00:33

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Never seen it either. Hell I just got around to seeing Point Break like a month ago.

The Fast and Furious comparison is fair, but not quite as accurate as I was lead to believe. Mostly Brain is a lot like Keanu’s character. 

RacinBob > RacinBob 09/03/2019 at 00:42

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I am so glad I grew up in the late 60's and 70's. It was a lot easier then. Think of it. The guys import some drugs from M exico , and then use it to fund through a sale to some English rock star a 3 month road trip bumming off whomever they meet. .

Today, they would be $100K in student debt, the drugs wouldn’t be worth anything and they would  be scared to spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express ......  

RacinBob > ttyymmnn 09/03/2019 at 01:00

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Call me lucky bu t i t was a time when bottom feeding was a lot easier. Mainly because there were not so many people at the bottom...... I think my clean 66 mustang 6 cyl. cost me $650 in 1975 . Also this was when a summer coop job in engineering would pay for a year of college.

Lastly , it was a time when law enforcement wasn’t so hyper sensitized about drugs, sex crimes or alcohol . As such the easy ride culture was just there for those that were into it.....

I wasn’t part of that life style but it was real. Look up Alice’s Restaurant.

ttyymmnn > RacinBob 09/03/2019 at 01:19

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Alice’s Restaurant: Not a great film , but an important song. I’m a big Arlo Guthrie fan.

vondon302 > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 06:06

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The only good line in the whole movie is “ yeah I got a helmet”

Go watch this to make up for watching that.

RacinBob > ttyymmnn 09/03/2019 at 07:40

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I saw him on tour about 2 years ago. I very much enjoyed the show. His daughter also was with him and performed. 

CalzoneGolem > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 11:19

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I found the soundtrack recorded onto a blank cassette. I listened to it so much i think i t altered little CalzoneGolem’s brain chemistry.

jojo > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 17:53

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Did you ever take mind expanding drugs. ?  Of course not. You appear very straight. You will will live to a very old age hanging on to your flesh and die after a very dull life. You are the only one who thinks he has had fun. Maybe in your next life.  

jojo > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 18:01

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The bikers were counterculture and they thought all they had to do was sell some drugs and go off and live their life’s on an island somewhere but, things didn’t go as smooth as they thought. They were murdered. The gas tank with all the money went up in flames. You sound very dull. Go take a trip and get a clue...the end....

atfsgeoff > jojo 09/03/2019 at 18:08

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You are the only one who thinks he has had fun.

Why should I give a shit if nobody else thinks my life is fun? My fun is contingent upon my opinion, nobody else’s.

atfsgeoff > jojo 09/03/2019 at 18:15

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I take road trips all the time. R acked up 10,000 miles on my motorcycles this year alone. Just got back from a thousand mile trip last week, and had a grand old time. Hell of a better time than the characters in this movie did.

jojo > atfsgeoff 09/03/2019 at 19:21

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Right on. The movie was perfect. The perfect title, the perfect actors, the perfect writer, the perfect director, the perfect music, the perfect story on motorcycles across America, released in the perfect year 1969... Majority rules. You loose.  In the movie Fonda and Hopper lose but, in reality they made a ton of money from the movie they created... I think they won some awards....  Geniuses....

atfsgeoff > jojo 09/03/2019 at 20:10

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Majority rules. You loose.

This ain’t a democracy. Easy Rider sucks.