And
couldn't find it anywhere
That man is
Wyatt, knick-named Captain America because of the Stars & Stripes on his
helmet and chopper. He and his friend Billy want to join the Mardi Grass
festivities in New Orleans. En route they pick up a hitch-hiker, visit a hippie
community, are arrested when joining a parade without permit, meet an alcoholic
lawyer in jail, attract some undesired attention of locals and have a bad acid trip.
They eventually reach New Orleans, so Billy thinks they made it, but
Captain America, the more philosophical of the two, knows better: they blew it.
They have reached New Orleans, but haven't found America.
Fonda and
Hopper had both appeared in biker movies before (Fonda in The Wild Angels,
Hopper in The Glory Stompers) but Easy Rider is *not* just another movie about biker
gangs or outlaw bikers: Captain America and his friend are involved in drug
smuggling at the beginning of the movie, but they're no outlaws or Hell's
Angels and the movie refrains from the gratuitous violence of the previous
biker movies. Wyatt and Bill are freewheeling bikers: they're
anti-establishment but not anti-social. They envy a farmer who lives off the
land with his large family ("You can be proud of yourself"). At some
point, George Hanson, the alcohol lawyer (Jack Nicholson) says:
" You
know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone
wrong with it."
Easy Rider is
a movie about a country in transition, about the collision of the Old and New,
of the City versus the Countryside, of what has vanished and what is
yet to come. Fonda had the idea to construct the movie as a new kind of
western: he had recently watched John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in which the
protagonists are looking for a girl who was abducted by the Indians; in Easy
Rider the two would instead be looking for America. Wyatt and Billy are named
after Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and their journey to the East mirrors the trek
to the West of the original settlers: voyagers go looking for a better life and
discover that the paradise they were dreaming is not up there for the grabs.
From the
start, Easy Rider was a Fonda-Hopper project: Fonda would produce, Hopper
direct and both would work on the script. A rough cut had
a much longer running-time and an experimental structure, but in
post-production most story elements and experimental narrative effects (flash forwards, jump cuts, hand-held camera shots, etc.) were edited out. The finished movie
is a succession of vignettes, all with their own mood and structure, virtually without any overarching narrative. On the
surface, Easy Rider offers a typical, almost stereotyped image of the Sixties: drugs, hippies, free love; it also shares
some of its obsessions of the decade about the end of materialism and going back
to nature, but it's not naïve in its approach: it's a movie about the dreams
the young ones had, but also about their disillusions.
The movie is
immensely helped by László Kovács' magnificent cinematography of the landscape
and a now classic soundtrack. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were asked to
write an original score, but eventually it was decided to use existing tracks
by Steppenwolf, The Byrds, the Band, Jimi Hendrix and others.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Miscellaneous:
* The title
'Easy Rider' is a little erratic. Most people have interpreted as a reference
to bikers, but its original meaning was a horseman or a horse easy to ride. In the
Sixties it was used in relation to free love: men who lived with women who
practiced it, had a 'free ride'. Occasionally the term was also used for
someone who visited prostitutes (the boys in fact visit a whorehouse in New
Orleans)
* The
tracks used on the soundtrack were chosen by editor Donn Cambern; he used music
from his own record collection 'to get in the mood' during the editing process.
When confronted with some of the results, Fonda and Hopper decided to skip the
ideas for an original soundtrack by CSN&Y. In return Hopper grew a David Crosby moustache for the movie ...
_____________
1969 -
Directed by Dennis Hopper, produced by Peter Fonda, written by Peter Fonda,
Terry Southern and Dennis Hopper - Cast: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack
Nicholson, Luke Askew, Karen Black, Michael Pataki, Toni Basil
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