The Magnificent ’74: Road movies

“Nobody loses all the time,” spits Benny (Warren Oates) in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, before going on to prove incontrovertibly that some people do. By the time Peckinpah’s magnificently fucked-up road movie premiered in August 1974, American motorists on the real-life road also knew how it felt to be on a losing streak. Since the previous October when Arab oil exports to the US had been embargoed, a chain reaction had occurred. Average gas prices rose 14 cents per gallon between 1973-74, to 53 cents – peaking in some places close to $1 at times. Queues and rationing at gas stations became commonplace, while trucker strikes caused goods scarcities across the nation – not to mention that, in January, in a move designed to curb energy usage that must have seemed like yet another killjoy gambit by The Man, a national speed limit of just 55mph had been introduced. The symbiotic, quasi-existential relationship between Americans and their cars was being tested as never before.

But at the movies it was a different story – for a time. The road movie boom that started with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) was still going strong in 1973 with The Last Detail, Scarecrow and Badlands. And in 1974 it gave rise to two of the year’s most auspicious first features. Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (actually his second road movie after the excellent made-for-TV Duel in 1971) and Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot are, as debuts, paradoxically the most polished films in the genre of the year. But if they’ve aged well – aside from the homophobic tendencies of Thunderbolt , which are an attempt to either redress or reinforce the film’s homoerotic undertones – both also feel faintly impersonal. The hallmarks of Spielberg’s emotive, populist storytelling, and his preoccupation with broken families, are present in Sugarland, but in nascent form. And not till the final Midnight Cowboy-esque moments of Cimino’s gorgeous but derivative Thunderbolt does it hint at the more epic Greek-tragic canvas that would be the making of his career with The Deer Hunter (1978) and the breaking of it with Heaven’s Gate (1980). Taken as a pair, the films mark a transition between the truly subversive, troubling-to-the-mainstream road movie and the lighter, more domesticated late 70s/80s version.

And yet 1974 started out with one of the bleakest iterations ever. The same week the truckers reached a settlement, there opened to little fanfare a tiny, grimy indie called – what else? – Road Movie. Directed by Joseph Strick, then best known for his well-received if quixotic adaptations of Ulysses (1967) and Tropic of Cancer (1970), Road Movie is a fascinating curio, as wilfully ugly in its portrayal of the joyless industrial landscapes of the mid-70s Midwest as it is nihilistic about the grasping relationships between its three leads. Starring Barry Bostwick and Robert Drivas as buddies who co-own an ill-fated refrigerated truck, it is most notable for a rivetingly unsavoury performance by Regina Baff as Janice, the prostitute/bad luck charm they pick up, abuse and cannot get rid of. One contemporary review by the legendarily caustic Judith Crist can best be described as ‘livid’, especially toward screenwriter Judith Rascoe, for a movie that “indicates at most that the vision of woman as whore and destroyer of men is not restricted to the male chauvinist pigs of filmdom”.

Records are silent, sadly, on what Ms Crist thought of John Hough’s Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a scrappy pretext for some fine stunt driving, which gained hit status that even star Peter Fonda struggled to account for, and wherein the saving grace – Adam Roarke as introverted sidekick Deke – doesn’t even get his name in the title. However, one hopes she’d have taken an equally dim view of threats hurled at Susan George’s Mary, such as the logistically baffling “I’ll braid your tits!”

But few 1974 films attracted as much feminist critique as Alfredo Garcia, largely due to its deeply strange rape scene, which, coming just three years after Straw Dogs, helped seal Peckinpah’s then-reputation as an inveterate misogynist. (Also of note: the would-be-rapist biker is played by Kris Kristofferson, who was Ellen Burstyn’s sensitive rancher lover in Martin Scorsese’s quasi-road movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, released in December 1974.) But if you read Oates’s Benny as Peckinpah – and it’s hard not to, given Oates is wearing the director’s sunglasses throughout – Alfredo Garcia becomes a far more complex proposition, radioactive with self-loathing, but underpinned by the thwarted romanticism of a no-hoper guy in a clip-on tie who gains a head but loses his mind and never knows quite what to do with the overwhelming tenderness he feels for the woman (a superbly self-possessed Isela Vega) he has loved and lost. Peckinpah was shooting in a state of post-divorce alcoholic devastation, but the resulting film is clear-headed in crucial ways, locating the masochism in machismo, and filled with scorn for the seedily glamorised life-on-the-road narrative that even Peckinpah himself had indulged in (with The Getaway in 1972) but that 1974, bookended by Road Movie and Alfredo Garcia, saw thoroughly debunked.

That cannot be attributed solely to the gas crisis, of course. But while not as detrimental to the country’s morale as the protracted horror of the Vietnam War, or the disgrace of Watergate, energy instability added a new flavour of volatility to the mix. Because to hit America in the gas tank is to hit it in the solar plexus, and the same goes for the movies: almost as much as the western, the road movie fed into a mythos of restless libertarian self-sufficiency so integral to the national identity that it would have seemed that you couldn’t put a price on it. But it turns out you could, and it was 14 cents on the gallon.