"R" You Ready, Viewership?

 

Come the 1969 Revolution

EASY RIDER (1969) --- Jack Nicholson makes a speech where he says among other things, "This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it." What did his “used to be” mean … the fifties, forties? … the nineteenth century? Surely it was idealized time Jack's character recalled firsthand, which would place it most likely in the fifties. But wasn’t that supposed to be a period of paranoia, repression, suffocating conformism? We may assume Jack’s dialogue reflected the viewpoint of Easy Rider writers. Of these, Peter Fonda was born in 1940, Dennis Hopper 1936, and Terry Southern 1924. Was it a “helluva” country at a same time for all three? Who did Jack speak for? Nicholson himself, born 1937? The line strikes me as stock, sort of what you get from everybody eventually when they talk of better life in the past. It even plays cynical in a way, like Nightmare Alley’s Stan Carlisle where everybody had a grey-haired mother and a dog. Stock reading as he puts it, fits everybody. I could write now of how this used to be a helluva good country in 1969. So far as I was concerned at age fifteen, many aspects of it were, save ninth grade P.E. That’s fun of Easy Rider and how it pandered to world-weary teens who could mourn their nation’s lost Eden, and what … wish life could be what it was when they were twelve? Snake in my Eden was The Wild Angels three years before and taking then-pledge not to attend more biker flix. Now I’m older and world-weary enough to groove with Easy Rider’s ninety-five minute ride across helluva country that was five and a half decades back and counting.

I read how Dennis Hopper proposed a four-hour cut, him locked out of editing like a modern-day Von Stroheim, Easy Rider a tarnished gem as result. The boys also fought over profits and writing credit. I enjoy Hopper who is sleazy and greasy as he’d been at villainy since the mid-fifties and would be again for comeback that was Speed in 1994. He was what moderns figured hippies to have always been, as in don’t let him get close enough to smell. Hopper was a climber who drank wine with Selznick and others of old Hollywood, married judiciously (Brooke Hayward) so he could stay in such circles, collected art and was pals with connoisseurs like Vincent Price. Protest becoming the fashion saw Dennis glomming on. He’d straddle old and new Hollywood to run a lavish and long-running con, a truest Stan Carlisle the industry had. I bet without knowing for sure that he grabbed a nice hunk of Easy Rider coin for himself, and spent same for more art, or peyote, or whatever recreation engaged him. Easy Rider is remembered as an “outlaw” movie but was really no more so than a hundred cheapies Roger Corman had done, and he might have herded this one but for seeming sameness of the concept and Roger's professed distaste for Hopper. Easy Rider was trippy and seemingly made by hippies for hippies, this to excite “normies” mostly kids who could but dream of dropping out, loving in, or whatever indistinct conduct these opportunity-driven rebels were up to. Easy Rider gets off to arresting start, Fonda and Hopper buying cocaine south of the border to resell and us in mild suspense as to what will become of them in consequence. Sight of Phil Spector enhances quease factor. What follows is improv amidst commune backdrops, Mardi Gras with the cast in stole takes like blown-up 8mm, echoed by riding in a parade sans permit for which they get busted and meet Jack Nicholson. Him and Luana Anders are here to link them and us with AIP.

Easy Rider was rated R and cunningly sold. The one-sheet read “A man went looking for American and couldn’t find it anywhere.” Oh brother… that again, but great salesmanship, and Easy Rider didn't chicken out on what its bleak outlook foretold. The ending was Deliverance come early, guys in the pickup unknowns who would stay that way, Easy Rider their only film appearance, at least credited. “We gotta go back” is a best and most chilling line in the picture. So who called or calls Easy Rider a modern masterpiece? Those selling it surely, then and now, fact for sure it’s a masterpiece at digging dollars that so eluded most theatrical releases in 1969, youthquake as result with disasters to follow not unlike scurry after elephantine musicals to re-strike lightning that was The Sound of Music. Peter Biskind’s 1998 survey of Babylon that was late-sixties-seventies Hollywood assesses Easy Rider on frankest terms. His is an ugly saga (try putting this book down), not a time or place I’d want to have been part of, except I was for being part of the hoped-for audience. Counter-culturals were empowered, but as Peter Fonda’s Captain America admitted, “we blew it.” In fact it was blow that would blow it for much of the seventies and into the eighties. Lots claim the early to mid-seventies as last gasp of a Golden Age, which beats me as to basis for such, though like everything, it’s a matter of taste and at what time films made their biggest impression on a person. Easy Rider seems more so a relic than much we like from the thirties or forties, and maybe that’s because it was and remains so representative of a gone and, to large extent discredited, day. Are there still easy riders back and forthing across America and not able to find it?

One Side, Doctor Dolittle --- Midnight Cowboy is In the Works

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) --- Once rated X. Hard to see why now. Jon Voight is a Texas “hustler” who comes to New York and gets trimmed as anyone would expect for going to New York. A good thing about pictures like this and Shaft and others is characters moving about streets, especially walking past theatre marquees, the city decaying sure, but neon is still afire and there are oceans of it. Voight walks by (repeatedly) a nicely dressed front for Frankenstein Conquers the World and Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, one of AIP’s last combo bids for kid admissions. Midnight Cowboy was among last “daring” ventures before its kind became common for being imitated. The X rating hypoed attendance and that surprised most. More so when the film won “Best Picture.” The rating was dialed back to R when the MPAA realized there were pictures far dirtier in Cowboy’s wake. Funny thing was no cuts required. They just sort of admitted they’d been wrong. Midnight Cowboy deals with the sex trade without having a lot of sex. Just lots of talk about sex. Dustin Hoffman shows up well into narrative and is fun in ways you’d not expect from an intense Method player. His humor is there and consciously applied, so we can’t say Hoffman immersed his self too deep. He knew the audience wanted fun from his freak part and so gives it. I enjoyed him a lot. Hoffman could do “Old Hollywood” and be a man of a hundred, if not thousand, faces. Watch him in Agatha be a suave and romantic leading man, several inches shorter than partner Vanessa Redgrave, but what did he care? There aren’t drugs in Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman’s Rizzo wants coffee and Voight puts ketchup on crackers. This might be Gotham in the early sixties rather than late.

New Erasing the Old ... Joe Buck Passes Tarzan and Frankenstein

Relationship between the two is key. They could have been another Newman-Redford in less seedy circumstance. I don’t know if people watch Midnight Cowboy anymore because it is sort of dated. For that matter, how much from 1969 is palatable? They were breaking barriers long enough to make most wonder what all of fuss was about to begin with. Lots weaned on screen freedom since then assume movies did not exist prior to the MPAA. In a sense they are right. Show them a Code picture and they’ll ask what hell is wrong here? The city as utterly bleak gets early workout. Watch Cowboy beside Barefoot in the Park, only two years difference! I remember movies taking leaps like this, being almost afraid to go see some of them. It was more comfortable to stay home and watch Vera Cruz on television again. I had become too tentative a filmgoer, skipping forward marchers like Midnight Cowboy, but willing to try on Five Easy Pieces, later get snakebit by Straw Dogs. Even beloved horrors upset my too-tender sensibilities (The Conqueror Worm), so why did I heart The Wild Bunch so? Movies they were a-changin’ even if big deals seem small now. Fifty-six years to toughen up enough for Midnight Cowboy seems long, getting grown up coming slower to some of us. Criterion has a Blu-Ray, customary revelation with movies murky in memory, print and presentation wise, as though they were deliberately shot that way. Not so as evidenced here. That alone is reward for revisiting much from the late sixties and seventies. Theatres by that time had gone to seed surely as streets in Midnight Cowboy.

UPDATE --- 2/3/2025 --- 8:10pm. Donald Benson sends a note with a most welcome comic strip.

A 70s strip by the late Jules Feiffer. As time goes on many people recall their MGM past (or postwar equivalent) as real, either personally experienced or just out of reach due to bad luck.