There is a beautifully sustained episode of suspended animation at a hippie commune, where again the air is gentled by pot, all human relationships seem easy and entertainers of abysmal incompetence absorb the benevolence of the chemically pleased. And the two men look like fair warning, outriders of apocalypse, as they glide past in their schizoid costumes (one dresses to hide oneself in fantasy) on their indolently powerful mantis-like bikes. The scene unreels like a silky, hypnotic dream, because the odd effect of the strident rock and roll that blares from the sound track is to make the action seem wrapped in eerie silence. It is a beautiful evocation of America as a ribbon of road through magic lands. It may only be coincidence, and marijuana may yet be recognized as the cure for what ails us all, but the demeanor of Wyatt and Billy does not seem to prove the point. But, so the script goes by these knowing men, when George is sober he is wide awake, when the other two are not high they are merely low, if indeed not half asleep. They pity friend George for his addiction to booze. It is true that every night over their campfire Wyatt and Billy smoke pot, achieving thus a sudden irrational loquacity, accompanied by inane giggles. His imagination, wit, curiosity and love of life seem effervescent (and he is only the rich-boy drunk of a very small town) by contrast with the flat impassivity of the others. They seem crushed speechless by melancholy, and though I Understand that taciturnity is the preferred style – each initiate being absorbed in his private secretions – I noticed that Wyatt and Billy came at least wanly to life when they picked up a rebellious and alcoholic young lawyer in a crossroads town (Jack Nicholson). But it is not retribution indeed, they might have passed safely if the cretins in the pickup truck had realized that they were big traders on holiday.Īnd another question I would like to shout across the gap is why, if these two are so freely doing their thing, they are so morose about it.
It is true that they come to a bloody end, gunned down by a couple of Southen rednecks for their long hair. Wyatt and Billy are presented as attractive and enviable gentle, courteous, peaceable, sliding through the heroic Western landscape on their luxurious touring motorcycles (with the swag hidden in one of the gas tanks). on the other side of the gap, to buy freedom at that price? If so, grooving youth has a wealth of conscience to spend.Ĭlearly the makers of the film think it O.K., and they are Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern, the very knowing, if no longer very young, trio who in various combinations wrote, directed and produced. Pulling off one big job and thereafter living in virtuous indolence is a fairly common dream of criminals, and dope peddling is a particularly unappetizing way of doing it. Wyatt and Billy (names borrowed from the fumigated memory of the two outlaws of the Old West) make the bankroll on which they hope to live a life of easy-riding freedom by smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin across from Mexico and selling it to a nutty looking addict in a goon-chauffered Rolls Royce. Since Easy Rider is the film that is said finally to separate the men from the boys – at a time when the generation gap has placed a stigma on being a man – I want to point out that those who make heroes of Wyatt and Billy (played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) have a reasonably acrid dose to swallow at the start of the picture.
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper revved up their motorcycles and, like Jack Kerouac, inspired a generation of young people to hit the road. Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson.
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