The Sugarland Express

The first image of The Sugarland Express (1974) shuts down the mythic possibilities of the American open road even more decisively than Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough work Duel (1971), the TV movie wherein a motorist is pursued throughout California by a faceless truck driver. The Sugarland Express opens on a road – a crossroads, with its forking possibilities – in an empty landscape. It is a landscape, however, blocked by road signs, ‘civilised’ by civic authorities to limit human action and movement. And that is even before we discover that one of these roads leads to a detention centre, its route marked by fences and the architecture of incarceration.

A Greyhound bus approaches the screen. Buses do not have the same romance as cars in US movies; they are usually a means of last resort, determined by economic migration, perhaps, or flight from the law or malefactors. In a film layered with allusions to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, a bus in such a landscape might remind us of North by Northwest (1959) which, given that Cary Grant is being set up for assassination in a cornfield, is hardly a memory of freedom.

Despite the bus, The Sugarland Express will be a film about cars – cars used for escape and pursuit, and as a temporary refuge. The first car we see, however, is going nowhere, stuck on the side of the road, its insides spread out alongside like the parts Charlie Chaplin removes from the clock in The Pawnshop (1916), or a filleted fish. This automotive inertia is an indication that Spielberg is going to take apart the inherited conventions of the road movie and its progenitor, the Western, and reassemble it as something new.

That novelty is embodied by the film’s protagonist Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn).  The recent cycle of American road movies – such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), and Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971) – had been overwhelmingly male-dominated. Its protagonists were men bewildered by a contemporary America of corporations and feminism, where traditional notions of ‘manliness’ were suspect. The narratives of such movies centred on the search for identity-affirming freedom through a mastery of the landscape. Women, at best, fulfilled certain imperatives on the way – as a kind of biological pitstop – but such films were not interested in their agency or subjectivity (one exception being Barbara Loden’s 1970 Wanda, the great feminist anti-road movie). The motives that drive Lou Jean’s yearning for escape – family, motherhood, home, validation as a woman – make The Sugarland Express a quite different road movie, one based less on rebellious individuality than companionship, equality, and social acceptance.

In fact, when Spielberg reassembles the parts of the road movie in The Sugarland Express, he generates two parallel films, one undermining the other. The first is the kind of crime plot that had been done to death in the cinema by 1974 and was being recycled on prime-time TV where Spielberg made his professional reputation. This is a plot of prison breakouts and criminal pursuit, with guns, car chases, shootouts, and the inevitable cornering of the quarry. The Sugarland Express works perfectly well on this level. It is noticeable that Lou Jean’s husband, the floundering Clovis (William Atherton), only assumes control of this narrative the moment he acquires a gun (one, moreover, taken from another alpha-male, the policeman they hold hostage). This acquisition, however, locks Clovis into a time-honoured and fateful narrative destiny that can only result in his death.  

In this scenario, Lou Jean becomes a femme fatale, the powerful and manipulative woman in film noir who lures the flawed but essentially decent hero to his destruction from a place of comparative stability (Clovis has four months left to serve in a facility whose atmosphere seems more carnival than carceral). It is Lou Jean who persuades Clovis at the climax to leave the car to retrieve their son Langston from his foster parents in Sugarland, even though it is clear to everyone else that the police have set a trap and the boy has been removed elsewhere. This is the kind of misogynistic fictional world where men are men and would get along very nicely thank you very much if it were not for some pesky woman.

In the second narrative, Lou Jean’s transgressive energies are celebrated rather than condemned. It is Lou Jean who generates the film – the screen is only a plane of static signifiers until she disembarks the bus and walks with purpose to the detention centre where Clovis is incarcerated. In The Sugarland Express, appearances do not give the whole story; Lou Jean is wearing her husband’s clothes under her own. In a world of rigid gender codes and assumptions, Lou Jean’s transgression begins with this appropriation of gender. It is Lou Jean who threatens to terminate their marriage if Clovis doesn’t do what she asks. It is Lou Jean who has planned the escape and their itinerary to Sugarland, right down to scraping together the bus fare. To Clovis’ horror, she drags him into the male toilets – demarcated as a male space in two languages, English and Spanish – to change his clothes. It is Lou Jean who makes the fateful decision to steal the old couple’s car that they are hitchhiking in when they are stopped by highway patrolman Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks), leading to the film’s first car chase that will end in destruction and the abduction of the policeman, thereby mobilising the legal and pseudo-legal resources of the state. As so often in Spielberg films, individual desire in The Sugarland Express confronts the state apparatus.  

Lou Jean’s transgression extends beyond her criminal actions. Her proactive role makes her a rare exception in a Spielberg filmography full of women who are at best helpmeets, but more usually wives and mothers, often castrating figures inimical to the sense of wonder experienced by their children and child-men. In The Sugarland Express, it is Lou Jean’s sense of wonder that keeps the couple and their hostage going when reality intrudes. It is her wonder, laughter, and optimism that transform the genre narrative, turns a private dilemma into a public circus, and a car chase between criminals and law enforcers into a police escort, a parade, a ‘triumph’ in the classical sense. It is Lou Jean’s gleeful grin that bursts from the film’s poster in a rebuke to the moody machismo more typical of the genre, and the 1970s in general.

Lou Jean’s actions are rebuked by antagonists, but also by allies who cast her transgression against society as a failure of gender norms. Her husband accuses her in his absence of promiscuity (the age-old sin of the uncontrollable woman). Her horrible father is brought by helicopter to plead with her to surrender and dismisses her as “no good”. Maxwell calls her a “good woman at heart” who “took a wrong turn in life” – transforming the road into an ethical space. Radio reports initially imply that Lou Jean is an “unfit mother”.

When the world as it is fails to conform with the world as she wishes it, Lou Jean simply escapes the film. The Sugarland Express appears to end in the approved 1970s manner of disenchantment and futility. The couple fail in their quest; the two sympathetic law enforcers – Maxwell and Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson) – fail to prevent the disproportionate killing of Clovis. The final credits begin over a silhouette of a still-handcuffed Maxwell against the river where the car finally ran out of road, stranded like the automobile at the beginning of the film. The setting sun indicates closure and impending darkness, as well as the mythic sunset these neo-Western protagonists could not ride off into. The gloom is dispelled by those closing credits, and real life proves more generous than fiction. We are told that Lou Jean served 15 months of a five-year sentence and convinced the authorities to let her raise her son. Where fiction is closed, foregone, and fatal, real life allows Lou Jean to have her happy ending.  

Lou Jean and Clovis are fugitive parents in a patriarchy at once punitive and paternalistic. The accepted masculine values are passed from father to son – as when the militia group bring along a young boy for an ‘outing’ to shoot at human prey. Tanner emerges as the film’s ‘good’ father figure, recognising that the dangerous felons he is chasing are “just kids”. The most striking single shot in the film places Tanner, seen in his rear-view mirror, watching Lou Jean in the car in front as she looks through the rear window in the bottom half of the image, like a child on vacation signalling to a fellow traveller.  

To characterise Clovis and especially Lou Jean as errant children being pursued by a benevolent patriarch is to problematise the apparently feminist conception of Lou Jean’s character. Spielberg’s work suggests that he is more comfortable with child-women than adults. But the characterisation also asserts the value of play, as Spielberg does repeatedly in his films – play as a means of transforming an unsatisfactory reality. The reality created by actual, allegedly ‘respectable’ parents in The Sugarland Express is life-denying rather than life-giving. Lou Jean’s father states publicly that she should be shot, while Langston’s foster father offers a police marksman his rifle to kill the boy’s biological father.  

Why do the crowds gather and cheer on the fugitives in The Sugarland Express? In a film layered with intertextual citation from Looney Tunes to Billy Wilder, the key structuring allusion is to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), another period drama about larcenous criminals who become folk heroes. Both films were celebrated by Pauline Kael against prevailing critical opinion. Both share a Pop Art love of 1930s Americana – brightly painted road signs and advertising, cars and their appurtenances. Bonnie and Clyde was made during an era of protest for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, taking the US to the brink of social collapse. The film’s violence and bloodthirsty ending, and its battery of New Wave-inspired techniques paradoxically embodied a kind of optimism, a dream of change, at least within its young audience.  

By 1974, that dream had collapsed, with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the seemingly endless war, and the election of Richard Nixon and his morally corrupt administration (the subject of Spielberg’s The Post [2017], which takes the viewpoint of privileged insiders, rather than the indigent outsiders of The Sugarland Express). The Watergate scandal, wherein the President of the United States authorised criminal activity to shore up power, had a seismic effect on the body politic and the public’s faith in authority and its institutions. The Sugarland Express was released four months before Nixon’s eventual resignation and was in tune with the national mood. Tanner and the police force are introduced at a public enquiry which immediately casts doubt on their legitimacy and reliability. Tanner’s reserved code of honour can barely contain the chaos inflicted by his own forces, while his decency and openness are undermined by sinister players in the shadows in control of weaponry and technology.  

Against this facelessness, Lou Jean’s relatable appeal is enormous, and her transgressive activities become a means of popular protest. The corruption at the political centre is countered by the film’s delight in ‘quirky’, local characters with their distinctive accents and idiosyncratic mannerisms. This celebration of the local and oddly normal is Spielberg’s optimistic response to national corruption and distinguishes The Sugarland Express from gloomier post-Watergate films like the same year’s The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974). Spielberg would go on to make prestigious, big-budget, awards-baiting history lessons later in his career, but it is this genre film based on a true story of apparently little importance that spoke to its own age as much as it did to the recent past it depicts – and which seems as pertinent to the era of Trump as it did to that of Nixon.

The Sugarland Express (1974 USA 105 mins)

Prod Co: U Zanuck/Brown Company Prod: Richard D. Zanuck, David Brown Dir: Steven Spielberg Scr: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, based on the story by Spielberg, Barwood, Robbins Phot: Vilmos Zsigmond Ed: Edward M. Abroms, Verna Fields Mus: John Williams

Cast: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, William Atherton, Michael Sacks