The Great Movies III

Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play Captain America and Billy, journeying cross-country on their motorcycles, using a drug deal in Los Angeles to finance a trip to Mardi Gras. The drug is cocaine (sold to a dealer played by rock producer Phil Spector), but their drug of choice is marijuana. Billy gets the giggles around the campfire at night. Captain America, who could handle it better, is cool, quiet, remote, a Christ figure who flies the American flag on his gas tank, his helmet, and the back of his leather jacket. (It would be a year later, after the release ofJoe, that flag decals were co-opted by the right.)

The making of the movie became a Hollywood legend. Fonda and Hopper took their screenplay (co-written with Terry Southern) to the traditional home of motorcycle movies, American-International Pictures. But Sam Arkoff turned them down, and they finally found funding at Columbia. The budget was so limited, there was no money for an original score, so Hopper, the director, slapped on a scratch track of rock 'n' roll standards for the first studio screening. The executives loved the sound and insisted the songs be left in, and Easy Rider begat countless later movies that were scored with oldies.

Motorcycle movies were not fashionable in 1969, although Hell's Angels on Wheels made an attempt in 1967 to break free of the booze-andviolence cliches. Directed by Richard Rush (7he Stunt Man), it was a largely overlooked precursor to Easy Rider, sharing the same cinematographer, Laszlo Kovacs, and even the same little-known actor in a colorful supporting role: Jack Nicholson, who played a gas-station attendant named Poet. Hell'sAngels on Wheels is a great-looking movie, but it took Easy Rider to link two symbols of rebellion-motorcycles and the hippie counterculture-and catch the spirit of the time.

Easy Rider was playing in theaters at about the time Woodstock Nation was gathering in upstate New York. It plays today more as a period piece than as living cinema, but it captures so surely the tone and look of that moment in time. There's heavy symbolism as Fonda throws away his wristwatch before setting off on the journey, and the establishing scenes, as Captain America and Billy stash their loot in a gas tank and set off down the backroads of the Southwest, are slowly paced-heavy on scenery, light on dialogue, pregnant with symbolism and foreboding.

One of their bikes needs work, and they borrow tools at a ranch, leading to a labored visual juxtaposition of wheel-changing and horseshoeing. Then they have dinner with the weathered rancher and his Mexican American brood, and Fonda delivers the first of many quasi-profound lines he will dole out during the movie: "It's not every man who can live off the land, you know. You can be proud." (The rancher, who might understandably have replied, "Who the hell asked you?" nods gratefully.)

A hitchhiker leads them to a hippie commune that may have seemed inspiring in 1969, but today looks banal. A "performance troupe" sings "Does Your Hair Hang Low?" on a makeshift stage, while stoned would-be hippie farmers wander across the parched earth, scattering seed. "Uh, get any rain here?" Billy asks. "Thank you for a place to make a stand," Captain America says. The group leader gives the Captain and Billy a tab of acid and the solemn advice, "When you get to the right place, with the right people-quarter this."

If Easy Rider had continued in the vein of its opening scenes, it's a good question whether anyone would remember it today. The film comes alive with the electrifying entry of the Jack Nicholson character, a lawyer named George Hanson whom they meet in a jail cell. (They have been jailed for "parading without a permit" after wheeling their bikes into a small-town parade.)

Historic moments in the cinema are not always this easy to identify: Nicholson had been in movies for years, but his jailhouse dialogue in Easy Rider instantly made him a star. "You boys don't look like you're from this part of the country," he says. He's an alcoholic lawyer on good terms with the cops; he arranges their release, supplies the name of a topnotch whorehouse in New Orleans, and says that he's started out for Mardi Gras many times without getting past the state line. That sets up the film's most famous shot: George on the back of Billy's motorcycle, wearing a football helmet.

Nicholson's work in Easy Rider created a sensation. Audiences loved his sardonic, irreverent personality and were primed for his next film, Five Easy Pieces (1970), with its immortal chicken-salad-sandwich dialogue.Then and now, Easy Rider comes alive while the Nicholson character is in the movie. That night around the campfire, he samples grass for the first time ("Lord have mercy, is that what that is?") and then explains his theory that extraterrestrials walk among us. He uses a confiding tone, sharing outrageous information as if he's conferring a favor; it would become his trademark.