Never Lose Your Shadow

As time continues to move forward, the key is to understand where you’re going and why. It’s certainly what I’m trying to figure out and it’s a question the main character of VANISHING POINT also appears to be silently asking himself at the beginning of the film which, in a way, is also the end. The film hasn’t told us his name yet but even from the start he seems pensive, uncertain, then after taking a moment to contemplate things he drives off again and soon, as the film freezes, the car vanishes. This would presumably be symbolic since at first this seems like a realistic film, but maybe not. The moment is the vanishing point, after all, the point where the film flashes back to where his epic drive started. But even that doesn’t provide all the answers. Earlier this year, VANISHING POINT played as a midnight show at the TCM Classic Film Festival at a screening introduced by Edgar Wright. I wasn’t there, not because I didn’t want to be, I just can’t do midnight shows anymore. And VANISHING POINT has never really felt like a midnight movie to me since for a film that spends so much time in a car speeding as fast as possible, it seems oddly contemplative, unwilling to provide all the meanings. There’s much more to take away from it all than you sometimes want to do at such a late hour. Maybe the thing about this film is that it can mean just about anything you want it to. Even if the answers are right there the whole time, from the beginning to the end.

A car delivery driver known only as Kowalski (Barry Newman) arrives in Denver late on a Friday night and is ready to head out again immediately on his next job. The car he is given is a 1970 Dodge Challenger to drive to San Francisco and deliver by Monday, but Kowalski soon makes a bet with his speed dealer that he can deliver it by Sunday afternoon. Almost immediately, Kowalski is driving fast enough to catch the attention of the Highway Patrol with multiple officers coming after him as a blind disc jockey known only as Super Soul (Cleavon Little) uses a police frequency to guide Kowalski over the air and help evade anyone coming after him. But as he crosses from state to state, from the highway to the desert and back again, the Highway Patrol in California are determined to find a place to stop Kowalski once and for all.

It’s the chase. The unending feel of the chase. The enigma that is VANISHING POINT is a film I’ve returned to a number of times over the years without really knowing what I think of it, reacting a little chilly to it at first, but now there have been so many viewings for various reasons that it’s begun to mean something, even while knowing it can be a tough movie to get a full handle on. On the surface, it certainly seems like more of a straightforward car chase movie when compared to the more introspective, if not artier, approaches taken by things like EASY RIDER and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, two films which in fairness might very well be better in many respects but sometimes you go where the mood takes you. VANISHING POINT is more about the sense of speed, for one thing, and released in 1971 somewhere in between those two, on the surface it’s the one that feels like it would be more at home in the drive-ins. Those other two films are more mellow in their sadness and sense of regret with a natural quality that makes them feel as if they emerged out of the earth completely formed, ready to be viewed for all eternity. VANISHING POINT has a little extra polish to it that plays more like a regular movie but it also has a sense of ferociousness that makes it feel like the film is going to burn out at any point, always determined to keep the car going full speed at whatever cost. It’s also not a surprise to learn that Twentieth-Century Fox later paired it on double bills with THE FRENCH CONNECTION and DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY. There were a lot of chases in the seventies but few of them feel like VANISHING POINT. Few of them offer these kinds of questions. Directed by Richard C. Serafian, whose other credits include THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING and SUNBURN plus acting appearances in films like BUGSY and BULWORTH, both opposite Warren Beatty, the film has an energy and pull to it beyond the rush of the chase, wondering what’s going on behind Kowalski’s eyes, wondering what he’s thinking about those times when he pulls the car over to contemplate and decide where he’s going to go next. To decide whether he’s really speeding towards something or away from it.

With a screenplay by Guillermo Cain (from a story outline by Malcolm Hart) the film doesn’t waste any time letting the chase begin once it goes back to the start, just as Kowalski doesn’t waste any time getting out there on the road and going as fast as possible. Some of the most impressive footage with him being pursued by multiple law enforcement officers in cars and on motorcycles is mostly confined to the first half, with an undeniable thrill to those early scenes featuring expert stunt work as he drives along the Colorado River with the water rushing by with Bobby Doyle singing “Girl Done Got It Together” on the soundtrack. It all plays like maybe a more serious version of what would turn up in multiple Hal Needham movies several years down the line, before it becomes more about Kowalski simply trying to keep going. Returning to the film draws me into that early ‘70s vibe where so much feels uncertain and it’s a film resistant to explaining itself. What’s there is the feeling that comes from staying focused on the road and you can tell just how hard Kowalski is pushing this car to go faster. To him, there’s no reason to ever slow down.

Three things matter in VANISHING POINT. Kowalski, the landscape he drives through and that Dodge Challenger. Kowalski is meant to be mythic. Everything we hear about him is part of that, he’s become a very important figure to people out there. He has a backstory that’s a little like Elliott Gould’s character in GETTING STRAIGHT which was released the previous year, someone who spent the sixties doing seemingly everything and going everywhere including a stint in Vietnam, only they face their possible futures in different ways. And the sixties are now over so, just as “Where Do We Go from Here?” is also sung by Jimmy Walker in that initial chase section, where is Kowalski supposed to go from here? Elliott Gould in GETTING STRAIGHT wants to teach. Kowalski wants to drive or maybe he just wants to go nowhere and everywhere, at least that’s what it seems like. It’s not even clear when he ever sleeps. And Kowalski does drive, pausing when he needs to even if it’s just to fill up the tank, taking that moment to decide the next step, standing next to his car when he’s out of any other ideas. We don’t know what he’s thinking, it doesn’t matter. The film is a product of its time, shaggy like so many favorite ‘70s films are, offering a nude girl riding a motorcycle like no other decade would, but so what. It’s hard to imagine this film being a product of any other time anyway and there’s no reason to want it to be.

The landscape becomes more barren the further Kowalski heads west, with the occasional gas station appearing in the middle of nowhere and it all seemingly littered with stop signs that he has no intention of ever paying attention to. The look brought to the film by director of photography John Alonzo, three years before he shot CHINATOWN, always feels undeniably alive, alternating between shots where the car is off in the distance small as a pin in the frame, viewed against those massive vistas plus there’s also the rush that comes from catching Barry Newman as Kowalski in the car, focusing straight ahead with whatever’s in front the only thing that matters. Kowalski becomes one with the road, the way his white car fits in perfectly with the desert, the way he hides in the brush as a police helicopter searches for him. He’s told to ‘root right in’ by the prospector played by Dean Jagger who helps get him through the desert even as Kowalski barely understands a single word the old man is saying, just as no one understands why Kowalski is doing any of this. Throughout the film people seem to speak to Kowalski in their own codes, almost seeming to assume he’ll understand, and he mostly doesn’t say anything at all. He’s dubbed The Last American Hero by Super Soul, driving what looks like the coolest car in a movie ever and it’s the perfect thing for him to outrun everyone trying to chase him down, whether the cops or other racers or the over-the-top gay stereotypes who try to rob him played by Anthony James and Arthur Malet. There’s also the musical revival in the middle of the desert (Rita Coolidge is one of the singers) led by Severn Darden who doesn’t want strangers visiting but whether this really is a religious group he’s leading or something more sinister during that time of Manson is unclear, maybe the piece of the film that’s more a part of when it was made then anything. He doesn’t care about Kowalski and Kowalski doesn’t care about them. The Last American Hero has to keep moving.

It’s Cleavon Little's Super Soul who calls him that and he’s the guide for Kowalski, broadcasting from his station in some small town somewhere looking forward to the DJ played by Lynne Thigpen in Walter Hill’s THE WARRIORS with an almost supernatural understanding of what Kowalski is doing with his audience out on the street, somehow able to hear him, with Super Soul somehow able to know that Kowalski is listening or sometimes not. He’s the one who can put Kowalski’s actions into words, reminding people of the freedom of the soul he represents. And some of them don’t want to hear what he says, maybe going too far as some rogue members of the law are concerned, leading to an attack on the station led by a deputy in plain clothes who’s gotten a little too riled up by Kowalski. They’re presented as simple racists here as well as wanting to destroy the freedom Kowalski represents but anyone watching this can likely tell who they represent in 2026. And freedom means something else to them. It means nothing.

All the women Kowalski encounters through the film except one (we’ll get to her) have a similar look, often with long blonde hair, a gas station attendant who makes him think of the young girl he saved when he was a police officer from being assaulted by another cop, the nude girl on a motorcycle encountered by Kowalski who offers him anything he wants before showing him a collage she once put together of his infamous exploits over the years and alludes to what she did when she finished making it. One leading to the other in his mind as part of all the flashbacks which drop hints about his past and where he came from, each of them with more than a passing resemblance to his late girlfriend Vera played by the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Medlin who looks more like a woman of 1971 than anyone ever has, with a recurring love theme by the Jimmy Bowen Orchestra that seems to represent her or maybe just his thoughts of her as she asks him about the scar he doesn’t like to talk about with all the love in the world.

VANISHING POINT possesses a sincerity to go along with how intense it always is that keeps things moving but it’s also inscrutable in the way a poem is as if it was partly designed to be studio car chase film, partly an esoteric art film that didn’t explain anything and the two halves are fighting together. It feels like a filming of a non-existent paperback novel that I imagine as one long interior monologue, which simply leaves the visuals to explain anything as well as the chance for us to project any conclusion we want against the wall the film screens on. The chases are phenomenally done at their best but it’s more the vibe the film is going for beyond all the stunt work which matters, those grace notes away from the chases where it’s simply the tiny car moving through the landscape as the camera pans off to show the vista instead, allowing us to take every inch of it in. And it’s not about realism after all, so don’t ask about all the punishment the Challenger receives due to Kowalski pushing it so hard. It makes the car and how fast it goes that much cooler anyway. The film drifts in and out of the reverie of Kowalski’s past, the music adding such a feel of electricity to every sequence and it all calls to me now, as I remember Cleavon Little talking about how it Kowalski represents “freedom of the soul”. In the end, the meaning of the film and the meaning of Kowalski are one and the same.

These themes are expanded in what seems to be called the “U.K. version” which differs from the standard cut in featuring the one woman who doesn’t resemble any of the others encountered by Kowalski, played by none other than Charlotte Rampling. She appears late in the film as a mysterious hitchhiker who is simply and illogically there on the side of the road in the dead of night who Kowalski picks up and seems to have been waiting for him. Patiently, she says, the only way to wait for somebody, as Kowalski accepts an offer of pot from her that he turned down earlier from others and he’s willing to open up to this woman like he hasn’t with anyone else. He speaks of home being San Francisco, his destination, but it’s a fair question whether he thinks of anywhere as home. Considering the way the only other women in the film, the women of the California Highway Patrol, are the ones who seem to know how to track his movements when he enters the state, maybe California wasn’t the home he thought it was. The hitchhiker scene has a completely different feel from the rest of the film, maybe why it was cut in the first place, almost as if they brought in a guest director to handle this section but the sequence fleshes the whole back end of the movie out and without it the film almost feels lacking, too abrupt near the end, missing a key moment to at least begin to understand (DVD & Blu-ray releases, at least from Fox Video in the US, include both versions of the film). With this scene back in, it’s no longer just a film about driving. It’s much more a film about where Kowalski is going, what’s waiting for him and why he does what he does. Maybe this woman doesn’t exist, maybe none of the women exist. It doesn’t matter. The witchy energy of Rampling’s hitchhiker makes it clear that she is essentially death, a specter who is waiting for him, aware of what he’s possibly going to decide to do when the time comes, much as we want Kowalski to find a way to keep going and never stop.

It isn’t clear whether the vanishing point of the title, seemingly when the flashback at the film’s beginning starts, is meant to represent Kowalski’s decision of whether he should keep going, as if at the beginning he flashes back to where he started Twilight Zone-style to live it over again and really go for it so people will notice and he’ll be remembered, determined to drive so fast that nobody anywhere could ignore it. The tiny town of Cisco which appears empty at the start of the film is filled with people waiting for him at the end, after all. And at that point there’s nowhere left for him to go but forward. The look on Kowalski’s face near the end is one of total freedom and makes him seem at peace with what he’s doing but I find myself thinking like the highway patrolman played by Robert Donner (who has many credits, including several Howard Hawks films) who earlier knew how Super Soul was guiding him over the radio and at the end sees no glory in what just happened. He seems to understand that Kowalski meant something, his pursuit of freedom meant something. And all anyone can do at the end is stare at the smoke floating up to the sky.

For someone meant to be larger than life to the world, Barry Newman always plays Kowalski in a completely down to earth way, with little to no dialogue for long stretches but what he does get to say matters just as the look on his face matters and he always seems deep in thought with a sadness in his eyes, always remembering, considering, pondering which way to turn next. There’s a weary kindness to his voice when talking to the right person, as if he’s always hiding an old wound as he tries not to think too much about the past. Cleavon Little plays Super Soul like a powder keg ready to explode until he comes back down to earth realizing that there’s only so far Kowalski can go with the defeat seen in him undeniable (an uncredited John Amos in what appears to be his first film is Super Soul’s engineer) but it’s Dean Jagger as one of the people who Kowalski encounters in the flesh who really gets some of the best and most inscrutable dialogue as the prospector, offering up riddles to Kowalski about which way he should go in the same way that his own behavior baffles almost everyone else. Paul Koslo who appeared in THE OMEGA MAN the same year is the deputy with his own plans for Super Soul, Lee Weaver (the attendant who confirms Joe Pendelton’s correct arrival date in HEAVEN CAN WAIT) is Kowalski’s speed dealer buddy, Gilda Texter is the nude girl on the motorcycle who asks Kowalski if he wants to have some fun with her, Timothy Scott (instantly recognizable to me as the flamboyant hairdresser in Blake Edwards’ THE PARTY) is the biker Angel who does some recon work to help get Kowalski over the border. Charlotte Rampling, if you’re lucky enough to see the version she’s in, is hauntingly beguiling, expressing curiosity and total knowledge of Kowalski at the same time while making the film feel like it has that much more weight to it all, whether it does or not.

On a personal note, every now and then my mother used to talk about how she knew Barry Newman a little bit in New York long, long ago and it always sounded like she had a crush on him so this is one more flashback to the past which can happen for me during one of those many rewatches. Either way, she never forgot him. These days along with VANISHING POINT, certain people likely know the actor most from his excellent performance as Peter Fonda’s head of security in 1999’s THE LIMEY directed by Steven Soderbergh; he also plays Eddie Murphy’s agent in BOWFINGER which came the very same year. According to his New York Times obituary, he lived in the same Manhattan apartment from 1962 to his death in 2023, the sort of odd factoid which always interests me. Kowalski always kept moving, in the end going everywhere and nowhere. Barry Newman traveled the world appearing in films and TV shows over several decades (which included another memorable car chase in 1972’s FEAR IS THE KEY) but always stayed in the same place. Somehow this makes sense. The answers can be found, whether in VANISHING POINT or in our own lives. After that, it’s up to us to decide what those answers mean as the future gets closer, like it or not.