The Great Movies III

George is killed shortly afterward, by rednecks who have seen them in a roadside cafe and decide they look "like refugees from a gorilla love-in." The impact of his death seems shortchanged in the movie, which hurries on to New Orleans.

Captain America and Billy find the legendary whorehouse and drop acid in the cemetery with two hookers (including Karen Black in one of her earliest film roles). It's a bad trip, but maybe they chose the wrong place with the wrong people.

The last act of the movie is preordained. There have been ominous omens along the way (and even a brief flash-forward to Captain America's flaming death). Rednecks in a pickup truck use a shotgun to blast both men from their bikes. The camera climbs high into the sky on a crane, pulling back to show us the inevitable fate, I guess, of anyone who dares to be different.

The symbolic deaths of heroes became common in movies after Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Pauline Kael noted in her Easy Rider review that "the movie's sentimental paranoia obviously rang true to a large, young audience's vision. In the late '6os, it was cool to feel that you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless."

One of the reasons that America inspires so many road pictures is that we have so many roads. One of the reasons we have so many buddy pictures is that Hollywood doesn't understand female characters (there are so many hookers in the movies because, as characters, they share the convenience of their reallife counterparts: they're easy to find and easy to get rid of).

The motorcycle picture was a special kind of road/buddy movie that first came into view with Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954), flourished in the late 196os, and more or less disappeared a few years later. The movie grew out of pictures like The WildAngels (1966, also starring Fonda), but it also expressed a notion that the counterculture believed in at the time: you could leave the city and return to more natural roots. A sweet idea, but one that did not coexist easily with drugs. In scenes like the one where Hopper and Fonda teach Nicholson how to inhale, there's a quietly approving air, as if life is a treatable disease, and pot is the cure.

But Billy is paranoid, probably because of all the grass he smokes, and in later scenes, they're oblivious to the dangers they invite with their strange appearance. (There's a scene where they excite teenage girls in a restaurant with their aura of sexual danger, and local Good Old Boys feel threatened and plot revenge.)

Many deep thoughts were written in 1969 about Fonda's dialogue in a scene the night before his death. Hopper is ecstatic because they've made it to their destination with their drug money intact. "We blew it," Fonda tells him. "We blew it, man." Heavy. But doesn't the movie play differently today from the way its makers intended? Cocaine in 1969 carried different connotations from those of today, and it is possible to see that Captain America and Billy died not only for our sins, but also for their own.

t the dawn of the U.S. independent film movement, two of its founders made what Variety called its first epic. El Norte told the story of a Guatemalan brother and sister who fled persecution at home and journeyed north the length of Mexico with a dream of finding a new home in the United States. They were illegal aliens, but then as now, the California economy could not function without their invisible presence as cheap labor. El Norte (1983) tells their story with astonishing visual beauty, with unashamed melodrama, with anger leavened by hope. It is a Grapes of Wrath for our time.

The movie was directed by Gregory Nava, produced byAnnaThomas, and co-written by both of them. They were later to make My Family/Mi Familia (1995), which traces three generations of a Mexican American family in Los Angeles, and Nava became the executive producer and supervising director of the American Family series on PBS, about an extended Latino family in Los Angeles. But I met Nava and Thomas much earlier, in 1976 at the Chicago Film Festival with their first film, The Confessions ofAmans. It cost $24,000 and won the prize as best first feature.

That was before Sundance, before IFC, before Miramax. They were the co-founders of the Independent Feature Project, which today holds the Independent Spirit Awards in a vast tent on the beach at Santa Monica, California. When they founded the IFP, everyone at the meeting would fit comfortably into their living room. And when they made El Norte, no film like it had been attempted.