After a few years as a young wizard directing episodes of TV shows and one acclaimed TV movie (Duel), Steven Spielberg made his break for the big time in 1974 with this based on a true story movie, The Sugarland Express. Goldie Hawn has the featured role; her participation was key to getting the picture greenlighted by the studio (who wanted a big name) but she wanted in to show that her acting chops were not limited to romantic and other comedies. Because one thing’s for sure: this ain’t no comedy.
No, this is a serious film about two young people who get caught up in a chain of events from which there is no turning back. Hawn plays Lou-Jean and William Atherton her husband Clovis. Lou-Jean is just released from a few months in prison and Clovis, who she’s come to visit, has four months of his year left to serve. Their baby Langston, though, has been taken away by Child Welfare, permanently, and this Lou-Jean cannot accept. So she’s come not to visit Clovis, but to bust him out. Escape successful, they hitch a ride with another inmate’s parents, steal the car when their elderly driver is stopped by a highway patrolman (Michael Sacks), and then take the patrolman hostage and drive off in his patrol car to get their son.
Clovis and Lou-Jean’s journey is the stuff of tragic legend, doomed from the start. Only two small town 25 year olds who’d never been to the big city could even begin to believe that the authorities (as embodied by Texas Department of Public Safety Captain Harlin Tanner, played by the old cowboy Ben Johnson himself) would allow them to end up taking a little baby to Mexico. (Sugarland is a little town south of Houston not far from the Mexican border.) So they drive on and on to where they think the boy is, followed by an endless caravan of police cars and news reporters, holding Patrolman Maxwell Slide at gun point. The ending sort of foreshadows, say, Thelma and Louise, with its dirt and water and mass of chasers.
Like any good drama, there are light moments that cut through the tension, bringing temporary release. Momentarily disengaged from the chase, hiding for the night in an RV, the two lovers watch a Roadrunner cartoon at the drive-in next door through the window; a TV crew pulling up next to the truants for an on the move interview has its tires shot out by frustrated cops; denizens of the next to last town on the route hold a parade down Main Street with them as the central float, passing in toys and good wishes.
Spielberg shows the natural touch with relationships, image framing, and pacing here that everyone finds out about in his next movies: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Arc. He doesn’t need explosions (well, one small one when some wanna-be cops try to shoot up our protagonists) or drag racing-type challenges (okay, again, just one at the beginning of everything), just simple movement used as a framework for drilling deeper and deeper into the psyche of our two lost souls. The relationship of the three youngsters (the patrolman is only nine months on the job, more or less the same age) evolves as the time and intensity of emotions moves on; several times Slide says things that show he too is young and naive, willing to give his life if necessary to stop anything worse from happening, but wise enough to try time and again to talk his captors into surrendering.
Recommended
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