This is a road picture and the highway is the plot line, the line down the middle of the two-lane road is just a guide and our heroes don't follow rules. They cross the line as they drive. Now we would say in the best of the 21st that “They bad, man. They bad!” But the surprise is that they aren't or, at least Peter is not.
There is a treat with the arrival of Jack Nicholson who is almost too young to be Jack Nicholson except that I saw his baby face in Little Shop of Horrors. He is not hip but crazy and out of the world of down home, down in the South where ghosts walk the ante-bellum streets of his southern town where the police hold him after his drunk and bow to his family name.
Surprise! The man wants out to see the world on the freedom of that bike with his helmet a full story without needing more than to see him in it. And they leave like Kerouac and his Cassady on the way to adventures. They start off on a journey into the neverland of America about the time I came of age. The America when boys were buried under dams for telling people to vote and all our heroes were gunned down.
It was the sixties, man. We started in Camelot and in November of 1963, I was hitchhiking to work and President JFK and the wife who glowed – he glowed, too – glided by in their open Lincoln down Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa on their way to the airport to Dallas. I saw a hero in a life without heroes because, like him, the heroes are dead.
Now we have Jack Nicholson and we are rolling. There is the great scene when, the joint rolled, Jack smokes his first and they talk and then the action changes and the mood changes and the movie takes on the rhythm of the times — “they are a-changing.”
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Now that this is an Editors' Pick , I have to berate myself for one horrible error. Peter Fonda's father did not act in It's A Wonderful Life. That was Jimmy Stewart and I should have been awake and thinking instead of playing the keyboard and dreaming of old days -- good and not.
2 - SHARK
Nice piece.
I had one major problem with the movie: implying that America's PROBLEM could be simplified/symbolized by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck was sort of a WASTED opportunity --
although I also had a scary confrontation (as a longhair [on the road] at a small cafe in Amarillo, Texas).
What's funny is: nowadays, many small-town texas cowboys have long hair and a meth lab out behind the barn. My, how things change!
Also note: a few years ago, AmericanExpress had a commercial featuring Peter Fonda; at the end, it showed, "Member since 1965" or some-such early date -- which means our counter-culture socialist anarchist dope-smoking "hero" was carrying a friggin' American Express card at the height of the revolution!
: )