VANISHING POINT   1971
Directed by Richard Sarafian
105 minutes
In English

Since law-abiding conformity seems to be running rampant these days, I think it's time to re-screen this rebellious one-of-a-kind ultra-cult classic! Art film and exploitation road movie fuse together in Vanishing Point, an existential car chase film that races across the desert in post- Easy Rider America. Barry Newman stars as Kowalski, a drug dealer who bets that he can drive his Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours. He then loads up on amphetamines and begins his full-throttle journey through the American desert, picking up the wrath of the cops who are trying to stop him. When a hip black DJ (Cleavon Little) learns about Kowalski's odyssey, he turns the driver into a folk hero on his radio broadcasts, declaring him the "last free Man on Earth".

The car chases and excellent stunt work are set against the American West, beautifully captured by cinematographer John A. Alonzo. Vanishing Point is most assuredly a product of its time - the heady, anything-goes era of rebellion in the early 1970s. What a gem... and we will be screening the rare director's cut which features Charlotte Rampling.

One viewer's thoughts on the film that seems to sum up things pretty well:

"Vanishing Point is a "fin de siecle" story, a unique requiem for a quickly dying age- a now all-but-disappeared one of truly open roads, endless speed for the joy of speed's sake, of taking radical chances, of living on the edge in a colorful world of endless possibility, seasoned with a large number and wide variety of all sorts of unusual characters, all of which had long made the USA a wonderful place--and sadly is no longer, having been supplanted by today's swarms of sadistic, military-weaponed cop-thugs, obsessive and intrusive safety freaks, soulless toll plazas, smug yuppie SUV drivers, tedious carbon-copy latte towns, and a childish craving for perfect, high-fuel-efficiency safety and security."

This will be a full High-Definition screening.