Vanishing Point

To those who have in some way been affected by his mad dash drive from Denver, Colorado, to San Francisco, California, this man Kowalski is something of an enigma. His car delivery handler doesn’t understand why he insists on a self-imposed deadline of two days for transport, while law enforcement officials, who track his high-speed evasion with equal parts annoyance and confusion, wonder what exactly his hurry is. Even Kowalski’s animated ally, a blind disc jockey with a peculiarly mystical connection to the motorist, can’t help but ask, “What’s he trying to prove?” Directed by Richard C. Sarafian, written by Cuban-born Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and released by 20th Century Fox in 1971, Vanishing Point does little to answer these obstinate questions of motivation. Brief flashbacks fill in some of the blanks in terms of Kowalski’s past profile, but why he’s doing what he’s doing now, and why he does it the way he does, remains a mystery. 

The film is, basically, one long flashback, beginning at the end as Kowalski’s path is blocked by barricades placed to thwart and hopefully put an end to this perplexing individual’s hasty journey, which does indeed appear to be hurtling towards a premature conclusion. Played by Barry Newman, Kowalski is running out of time and running out of options – “Suspect stopped,” an officer optimistically declares over his radio. “Can’t get away.” But before the results of these impeding efforts are realised, the film retreats to a few days prior and piecemeal chapters of Kowalski’s life are steadily, though still ambiguously, revealed. 

A few things become clear, including the patently observable fact that Kowalski (“first name unknown”) is an unsettled man, and has been for some time. And now, nudged by a penchant for chemical stimulants, he can’t, or simply won’t, sit still. He’s so driven by this unstated, fatal force that the voluntary challenge he sets for himself – to deliver the car in such an unnecessarily perilous amount of time – appears nothing short of suicidal. But there’s more. He’s also a decorated veteran; at one point he had a now-departed romantic partner; he has a history of professional racing (and crashing); and he was, for an indeterminate period, an honourable cop, a character trait that endures to the present day. As a generally decent man, Kowalski preserves a strong moral compass throughout the film, most notably stopping to make sure those who challenge or pursue him – and inevitably fail – are not seriously hurt in the aftermath. He balances sheer recklessness with obvious skill and consideration, his solitary quest a contradictory matter of doing what he knows best and what he should know better. A concrete purpose lingers just out of reach, but his high-speed odyssey is, nevertheless, lawless, heedless, and captivating. 

As word spreads of Kowalski and his hurried endeavour, he soon embodies an appealing rebuke of authority, striking a chord with the collective counterculture and landing him in a presumably unintended position bolstered by the aforementioned DJ known as “Super Soul,” played by Cleavon Little. Unintended, but perhaps not surprising. When he was himself a member of the police and defended a young, female civilian from a depraved, handsy fellow officer, Kowalski was already on the side of doing the right thing, not simply abiding by an authoritative establishment bound by shielded brotherhood. Super Soul, who charts Kowalski’s course by plugging in to police radio frequencies, takes to the air in support of the driver’s mission, recognising the potential for public fascination with this renegade crusader. Super Soul’s investment is likely twofold. On one hand, Kowalski represents a degree of autonomy he, a blind man confined to a radio recording booth, can only imagine. At the same time, as an African American in rural America, Super Soul knows more than his fair share about violent oppression (made all too clear in the film) and recognises Kowalski’s value as an icon for the disillusioned and distraught.

Super Soul’s live narrative is part reportage, relating to his listeners Kowalski’s persistent pains to skirt the police, and part direct, one-way communication with his object of interest. Although Vanishing Point doesn’t have much in the way of meaningful exchanges between characters, Super Soul’s passionate declarations and words of warning and approval provide the film with the only articulated indications of what it all might mean. He cautions Kowalski about the “blue meanies” hot on his trail or lying in wait, testifying to the anti-authority sentiment of the picture (it grows increasingly amusing to see the police stunted by their own incapabilities and the regulations of cross-border enforcement), and he dubs the careening speedster the “last American hero,” signalling Kowalski’s unwitting station as a modern representation of the Western-influenced outlaw, a lost soul but also the “last beautiful free soul on this planet.” That sense of independence is particularly key as Kowalski digs himself ever deeper into an illicit hole from which there is no return. There’s a keen impression of self-determination expressed in his wilful refusal to quit, or even slow down. After all, why would he at this point? The damage has been done. To quote songwriter Kris Kristofferson, Kowalski has reached an enviable state where freedom becomes “just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Super Soul isn’t the only one Kowalski comes in contact with, even if the two merely “meet” over the airways. Outsiders all, there’s also a kindly old snake wrangler played by 1950 Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winner Dean Jagger; some hostile faith healers, high on singing, less so on strangers; two inept homosexual stickup men; two far-out desert dwellers, including a young woman riding happily nude on a motorbike (actress Gilda Texter was decidedly unhappy in the blistering desert sun); and a woman who emerges inexplicably from the desert wasteland and returns under similarly murky circumstances. Played by Charlotte Rampling in a scene removed from the American release of Vanishing Point, this furtive figure tells Kowalski she has been waiting for him “for a long time … Everywhere and since forever.” Some have interpreted her ominous appearance as a portent of death, and there’s no reason to refute that reading, but Kowalski’s impending end – whatever, whenever, and wherever that might be – is also beside the point. Like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, a 1969 predecessor on two wheels, Vanishing Point is less about the destination than it is the journey. The film is a scenic time capsule, a panoramic travelogue surveying a vast expanse of the United States and collecting individual samples of its eclectic populace in the process, mostly those off the beaten path of conventional civilisation. It is what Sarafian perceptively dubbed a “tapestry of Americana.”¹ 

That wide-open landscape is both foreboding in its uncertainty, literally and figuratively spilling into the unknown, and, with its seemingly unlimited possibilities, wholly inviting. It was and remains for many a curious fantasy to drive with unfettered abandon at unchecked speeds, rushing headlong in a symbiotic amalgam of mechanical force and human dexterity, and Vanishing Point, as much as any movie before or since, captures this instinctive duality. Racing across an unspoiled environment, a picturesque canvas out of place and out of time through which his 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T cuts its blazing path, Kowalski is therefore heroic by simply doing what most wouldn’t dare, and Sarafian directs Newman as such. Alternating between intense close-ups of the actor’s determined face – steely eyed behind the wheel but oftentimes expressionless, thinking but not saying – and wider shots of his phantom automobile, a white speck against otherwise muted desert colours, Sarafian and cinematographer John A. Alonzo express a tactful yet elusive harmony between a car and its driver, like a valiant cowboy and his faithful steed. Although the two would do fine subsequent work apart, with Alonzo manning the camera on such ‘70s staples as Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977), and Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979), they are operating in an exceptionally accordant capacity on Vanishing Point. Sarafian called Alonzo his “soul mate” on the film, giving him “more than half” the credit for the final picture,² and together they present and purify an engaging automotive hymn to the power and speed of American muscle, punctuated by the sounds of revving engines and a rock and roll soundtrack. 

Of course, Vanishing Point, like Kowalski himself, must reach a culmination of some sort. Newman, who was cast in the lead after Fox executive Richard Zanuck nixed Sarafian’s choice of Gene Hackman, provided his own understanding of the movie’s jarring finale, stating in a 1986 issue of Muscle Car Review, “Kowalski smiles as he rushes to his death at the end of Vanishing Point because he believes he will make it through the roadblock.”³ He went on to explain, in a 2006 issue of Motor Trend magazine, that the glimmer of light Kowalski perceives between two insurmountable barriers is “still a hole to escape through. It symbolized that no matter how far they push or chase you, no one can truly take away your freedom and there is always an escape.”⁴ Whatever the case may be, Vanishing Point is back where it started, in a small settlement that could generously be considered a town, where nothing much ever happens and even a hint of fleeting excitement is something to cheer for, or at least look into. Kowalski’s story has drawn a sizeable crowd of onlookers by this time, admirers and adversaries as well as the television news, but just as suddenly and randomly as the drama arose, it is soon over, leaving nothing but death, destruction, and (on screen and, it must be said, frequently in the audience) blank faces left to wonder, “Is that it?” 

Against all odds and all measures of good sense, Kowalski’s blatant defiance and intransigence, to say nothing of the assorted rebukes and social corollaries mentioned before, reflected a time when America, if not much of the world, was wearily burdened by war, corruption, unrest, and dramatically shifting tides of progress and regression. Artistically, however, Vanishing Point also epitomises a cinematic era when nearly every conceivable niche of spectator interest had its own represented subgenre, from nuns and Nazis to imprisoned women and predominantly Black action stars. For its part, Vanishing Point was an early and exemplary entry in the American “car movie” canon. Akin to Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), Gone in 60 Seconds (H. B. Halicki, 1974), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974), and the Burt Reynolds double feature of White Lightning (Joseph Sargent, 1973) and Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977), Sarafian’s film capitalised on an enduring screen fancy connected to the visceral thrills of speed, self-asserting power, and the tantalising potential of the open road. The movie’s emphasis on existential liberation, a theme popularly realised in European art houses decades before, showed just how effectively such concerns could be transferred to a precious and precarious time in American – and American film – history. Vanishing Point’s freewheeling structure, its enigmatic characters and exhilarating spectacle of velocity and liberty mark it as a consolidation of exploitation, commercial, and vanguard moviemaking at its finest, distinctly of its time on the surface, but utterly timeless underneath. 

Vanishing Point (1971 USA 105 mins)

Prod Co: Cupid Productions Prod: Norman Spencer Dir: Richard C. Sarafian Scr: Guillermo Cain Phot: John A. Alonzo Ed: Stefan Arnsten

Cast: Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger, Victoria Medlin, Karl Swenson, Lee Weaver, John Amos, Tom Reese, Paul Koslo, Robert Donner

Endnotes