The Sugarland Express

Steven Spielberg's 1974 The Sugarland Express was the director's first feature-length theatrically released movie.  (A sort of infant prodigy, Spielberg had already made several renowned made-for-TV movies, most notably Duel staring Dennis Weaver and a menacing semi-truck.)  The premise of The Sugarland Express is simple, direct, and has some of ancient dignity of old-time Western -- indeed, Ben Johnson plays a supporting role as a weary lawman pursuing the doomed outlaw lovers.  Luejean Poplin, played ferociously by Goldie Hawn, intends to go to a place called Sugarland, Texas to retrieve her toddler, Baby Langston.  Baby Langston, an unhappy sniveling infant, has been placed in foster care in Sugarland on the basis of a court order that Luejean is an unfit mother -- she has several shoplifting and larceny convictions. although she claims to be reformed and that a short stint in prison has made "a woman of (her).  She takes a bus to a desolate correctional facilty and during a family visitation weekend, the local Jaycees have helpfully provided lemonade, she busts her hapless, dimwitted boyfriend out of the jail -- he has only four more months to serve.  The fugitives hold hostage a young policeman, equally naïve and dimwitted, and, fleeing in his squad car, set off across the Texas to Sugarland.  The entire episode is an exercise in magical thinking -- Luejean doesn have any realistic perception for how this is all likely to work out.  Her boyfriend persuades himself that things will be okay in the end and, even, the callow baby-cop, who becomes friendly with his kidnappers, naively thinks that there is a possibility that the unlikely scheme will succeed.  In its time, the film was famous for Spielberg's brilliantly conceived car chases and crashes  -- of course, movie technology has far outstripped any spectacle that Spielberg could mount in 1974, but his action sequences remain excellent and powerful because they are not merely loud and spectacular, but also expressive.  The cars in the movie don't merely zoom and speed and crash -- they express states of minds of the participants:  exuberance, panic, and, in the final, shocking run to the border, exhausted desperation.   Even at this early phase in his career, Spielberg isn't much interested in romance or sex: unlike Bonnie and Clyde or the lovers in Altman's Thieves like Us, the attraction between Luejean and her amiable husband is not important to the film:  Spielberg's concern, something that he would obsessively reiterate in later picture, is a child custody dispute, a child deprived from its parents, and the parent's (or parents') frantic attempt to reunited with the lost child -- this is the subject matter both of Spielberg's worst movie, Hook, and, probably, his best picture, Empire of the Sun, and the theme is already manifest in The Sugarland Express.  The picture is impressively lensed -- the color schemes are largely monochromatic, and Texas looks muddy, impoverished, miniature.  Spielberg already has a propensity for staging action during the magic hour -- there are several shots filmed in the lingering twilight and, also, several sequences shot at dawn.  But the colorful lighting effects of those scenes settle into grim, grey November landscapes with little shabby towns huddled under stark leaden skies.  Spielberg runs the risk of patronizing the Texas folks that occupy the film and there are a  couple cringe-inducing scenes in which the director seems condescending to his characters -- but, by and large, the Texas environs are effectively portrayed and the small-town people in the landscape seem plausible and sympathetic.  Everyone has a gun and the film might be viewed, in a way, as sly commentary on gun rights in the Lone Star State.  Everyone grasps that the only solution to the plot is a death by gunfire:  baby Langston's dignified stepfather suggests to an officer that the police man use his rifle to shoot down the escaped convict and Luejean's father says that, if he had a gun, he would kill her himself.  Two terrifying Texas rangers snipers, both elderly men who store their bullets behind their ear-lobes, propose from the outset to gun down the fugitives and it is only Ben Johnson's patience and compassion that keeps the hero and heroine alive for the 110 minute stretch of the movie.  Certain things don't exactly work:  there is a scene in which the fugitives hide in a RV and watch a Roadrunner movie on an adjacent screen that tries to do too many things at once.  (Technically, this sequence is brilliantly conceived but too showy for the rather unassuming rest of the film.)  In that same sequence, we don't know exactly where the pursuers are located and it's not clear why they have withdrawn from their tight pursuit of the couple -- the sequence reads as idyll and a kind of interlude and, although its emotionally effective, the narrative elements of the scene don't seem right.  The final sequence, involving a run to the border, violates entirely the film's modest and realistic narrative -- suddenly, we seem to be in another picture, one involving big cliffs, deserts, and the old Rio Grande, filmed in elegiac golden light:  this is also impressive (Spielberg always gets the effects he wants), but doesn't ring true.  The Texas that we have been seeing look like southern Minnesota or eastern Nebraska -- but, suddenly, the geography changes and we are in the middle of the old West.  These are minor cavils with respect to film that retains it power to surprise and fascinate the viewer.