April 28, 2023 — The Sugarland Express
9 min readApr 30, 2023
- (Previous notes: Duel)
- (The Sugarland Express on IMDb)
- I mentioned in my introductory post for this project that The Sugarland Express is one of the Spielberg movies I remember the least. To be a bit more candid, I remember next to nothing. Goldie Hawn is in it and I think they are a group of criminals on the run? This came on TV when I was a teenager, so most-of-my-life ago, and I probably wasn’t paying very much attention. But Goldie Hawn is an all-timer celebrity crush, one of my first, which is probably why I idled in front of a TV as The Sugarland Express flickered along.
- It’s Spielberg’s first movie that was intended for a theatrical release. Also John Williams was already an Oscar-winner by this time (as was GH, for that matter), but this is his first of dozens of collaborations with Mr. Spielberg, for whom he would go on to compose three more Oscar-winning scores. Did you know about how much I know about Oscar trivia. Did you though. Okay time to watch this one, check this out…
- Starts with a “true story” disclaimer card. Then some Texas highway imagery. Someone is poking at a scrapped car while someone is getting off a bus. So far all of Spielberg cinematic features are about vehicles on highways.
- Ben Johnson is in this, another Oscar-winner. Hey, William Atherton’s name in the credits, he is the very dislikable fellow from Ghostbusters, Real Genius, and Die Hard. Maybe here too, we’ll see! Ooh, also Spielberg has some of the writing credit.
- GH is showing up at a prison place for a visit, and I think it’s a “getting out soon” prison. Her husband is the inmate and that’s who WA plays I see now. She’s dumping him. She gets so emotional talking about how Welfare is going to take their baby and is all Southern-accent-y about it that I can’t even make out what she’s saying. But I think she un-dumps him. She never meant it. They hook up in the men’s room and she helps him break out, but I think I remember the kissing from this scene because I liked GH so much and it looked fun to be on the other end of her smooches.
- I’m watching it on DVD and the color is not vibrant.
- 0:12:30 — New characters, a cop is driving some shit-talking cowboy somewhere, it seems like it’s kind of funny but I can’t make out the accents very well.
- Meanwhile, GH and WA had gotten a ride from a couple of old timers and they’re driving so slowly, because old, that the new cop character pulls them over. Even though his business is with the elderly driver, WA and GH freak out about it and GH just straight up jacks the car while the olds are out talking to Cop Protagonist. Car chase ensues. It’s pretty entertaining, there is a weird noise coming from the olds’ car complicating things, and the abrupt movements are jarring, plus that old troublemaker is still in CP’s backseat being a funny nuisance.
- GH and WA wreck that car but they manage to get CP’s gun and force him to drive them away at gunpoint, but they don’t know what they’re doing.
- 0:22:45 — John Williams’s score is currently interesting! It is a harmonica, some slide guitar, and some percussive sounds that I honestly can’t identify but it’s good. It is definitely unlike any other John Williams score that I can think of.
- I just had myself a good laugh at how this scene was done — they cut back to the Olds, still standing on the side of the road like CP told them to do. They are bickering politely and persistently. Another patrol car shows up and asks what they’re doing, then when it’s all good and figured out he tells them to stay there, then he drives away and they’re stuck there again to keep bickering.
- Is this movie a little Altman-y?
- GH and WA are now known to have kidnapped CP because GH waved a shotgun at that other patrol guy. And they cut to a courtroom where people start telling the judge and someone else that there is trouble afoot. In the middle of court proceedings. I think there is someone at those proceedings who is by golly the man you have to get when you have this kind of predicament. That guy starts radio-hollerin’ at all the cop cars, even one that’s in a car wash, and they all start flashing their lights and going to where they’re spozzda.
- We are havin’ us a real dinger of a shot up in here I reckon, the guy they summoned from the court who is apparently an Important and Respected Professional (hereafter IRP) catches up to the kidnappers and as they are all driving on the highway, IRP communicates with the car over CB radio, and it’s all done in one long shot with the actual driving very specifically choreographed and with the actors actually using the radio, it’s quite unique.
- Cut to… wait what was that, a little toddler making toddler-noises and then someone talks to the toddler and I was typing some other stuff so I didn’t hear what that was about.
- But now we’re back to the main attraction, and a convoy of cop cars is slowly trailing the kidnappers, and the kidnap car runs out of gas, so they make IRP push-roll them to a gas station. GH glances flirtatiously at IRP and now we all just want her to be our friend don’t we.
- On the radio they’re telling the whole story and everyone knows everything, ain’t no secrets here in Texas nosiree
- They are bickering in the kidnap car and GH oddly makes them go to another gas station, she says she wants to talk to someone. Gas prices there are 31.9 cents per gallon. Why did GH go there, something about being nice to a child it looks like? There is a long ribbon of some kind of ticket, and she is reading a magazine about kid products as they keep driving.
- The kidnap car bickering, which suggested that GH has been using her feminine wiles to get money, had to stop because GH had to pee. Instead of doing that at one of the gas stations they stopped at, it is for some reason necessary for an outhouse to be driven to them. The whole convoy stops for that, and WA actually correctly surmises that they have an armed officer hiding in there, and he makes that guy go away.
- We’re back at the house with the toddler, and of course the toddler is the child of GH and WA and so this must be the place called Sugarland where they are trying to go get their child, whose name is Langston. Real Texas name, Langston. Strong, hard-working name. I guess this older woman is the foster mother, who seems quite determined to for real adopt Langston.
- 0:51:13 — Everyone has kind of stopped with all that low-speed chasing and they’re all just strategizing in their places. I really have trouble understanding the accents. Imma turn the subtitles on.
- Sun is setting and the Cop Car Convoy (hereafter CCC) has set off again. Another cool shot of two cars, two cops talking to each other on the CB and eventually it’s a song. I truly don’t notice inter-car conversations like these in movies. It is a cool directing choice.
- Lots of car crashes happened, seemingly just because of dumb cop drivers participating in the CCC, but also WA yells at CP like he did something on purpose, I don’t quite get that.
- Oh wow, so WA and GH apparently made a big choice while we were cut away to other business — CP is tied up and handcuffed in a car in a used car lot.
- Okay, they didn’t abandon him or anything, they went and got some food maybe? And they’re snooping around RVs on that lot. GH and WA are crashing in one of them and having private married people moments. They can see the next door drive in movie and are enjoying the Wile E. Coyote cartoon until WA looks downright haunted by it.
- Some rootin’ tootin’ townies spotted them in the used car lot and just started shooting at them! Are THEY gonna get in trouble? You’re not supposed to do that! They take refuge back in the same old cop car, GH making sure to haul all her armfuls of ribbon. Prize tickets? What is that stuff? A lost cultural touchstone perhaps, I dunno.
- Okay, those vigilantes are indeed in trouble for doing all that shooting, although it’s a weird kind of trouble; IRP scolds them then beats up a car with one of their guns before having them arrested. /shrug
- I see now that they covered the lights/siren fixture with signs from the used car lot. Anyway, the CCC continues but kidnap car stops by a small town somewhere where there are fans holding signs. They have truly captured the public’s imagination. It’s a big show. It’s like Dog Day Afternoon, except that this came out a year before Dog Day Afternoon. Did you know that Sidney Lumet never won an Oscar? How do you direct 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network and never win an Oscar.
- Hah, a news van tries to interview them while they’re all driving, again kind of ambitious shot, but it ends in IRP shooting the van’s tires out and there’s a fun shot of the van overturning into a pond that I bet they were totally jazzed with how it came out. People were on the roof of the van in that overturning shot!
- They pass through a town where they are a one-car parade along the main street where everyone is celebrating them and giving them things, including a piglet, but also GH gives away her precious precious ticket ribbon. They are having a wonderful time. Maybe not WH as much because he’s trying to drive. But the clamor of attention on this situation from the public sure do be a sight.
- They arrive at the house where Langston is supposed to be and they just know, correctly, that Langston isn’t there and it’s a trap. But we know there is a sniper in there, so it’s suspenseful. Sure enough, the snipers snipe and WH gets bulleted pretty good, but still gets back in the car and they drive away. That did not look like a gunshot wound that would afford an immediate ability to operate a motor vehicle. What an amateur director!
- After they’re caught and WA is dead, we cut to a starkly different image of CP and IRP having a very denouementy final conversation as silhouettes against a sun-rippled river, it’s like a shot that you do because you always wanted to direct a shot like that, but it’s so different from the look of the rest of the movie. And although I wasn’t conscious of it during the movie, I realize now that the main harmonica theme sounds a little too much like the melody of “on the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…”
- So! Steven Spielberg’s first feature film is not a bad movie. There are way more boring ones to come. His capturing of all the moving car situations is predictably effective, and after this people might have been all “oh, that Spielberg kid is great if you need a picture with lots of driving”. But as I mentioned, there is an Altman-y quality which I don’t think I see in other Spielberg movies. You know, an ensemble of equally-likable quirky characters. Think Nashville, or Cookie’s Fortune, or The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. That last one is not an Altman movie, I realize, but think it anyway. It seems like that’s what he was going for and he succeeded. I think the sound was bad and the look was drab; the latter might be on purpose (the DP went on to win an Oscar for Close Encounters), and the former might be just a combination of mediocre recording, mediocre sound quality on the DVD transfer, and overcommitting to folksy Texas dialect. If you watch this, I recommend subtitles.
- I’m surprised that William Atherton is the main guy! I didn’t remember that. I don’t think I had a “William Atherton” box in my brain the last time I watched this. He’s likable enough, but imagine how much more boring this would be if Goldie Hawn weren’t constantly bristling with adorableness. This movie is not as heavy-handed as some of his later movies. I think later on he would have done it more heavy-handedly, like going harder with the relationship & character building throughout the movie so that we feel the tragic end of WA’s character more deeply. Would it be better that way? Maybe if it’s only a little teeny tiny bit more that way.
- (next: Jaws)
