Action vehicles on America’s sentimentally skewed open road

UW Cinematheque presents a trio of wildly varied 1970s car-centric features across three Fridays in July—”Vanishing Point” on July 12, “Race With The Devil” on July 19, and “Damnation Alley” on July 26.

America’s obsession with the automobile and open road has long been fertile material for the movies. Tapping into our cultural mythos about Western expansion and a romanticized ideal of rugged individualism seemed like a surefire way to make a hit movie in the 1970s. Studios churned out car-chase movies, motorcycle movies, and trucker movies, which were often geared towards the most car-centric audience of all at drive-in theaters. 

UW Cinematheque’s summer “Action Vehicles” series collects three films over three consecutive Fridays in July that offer vastly different examples of how car culture permeated American cinema. Vanishing Point (1971), starts off the series on July 12, at 7 p.m., and is one of the all-time great car-chase movies. Race With The Devil (1975), screening the following week on July 19, at 7 p.m., is a paranoid backwoods nightmare; and Damnation Alley (1977), which closes out the series on July 26, at 7 p.m., is a wildly misguided sci-fi road trip. All three films will be shown in new 4K DCP restorations from 20th Century Fox.

A heady mix of arthouse nihilism, damn-the-man politics, and adrenaline-pumping thrills, Vanishing Point set the standard for 1970s car-centric movies. Essentially just one big extended chase, the film follows Kowalski (Barry Newman), a burned-out transport driver in a supercharged Dodge Challenger. Having made a bet with his amphetamine dealer that he can drive to San Francisco in two days, Kowalski sets out at top speed across the American West, quickly drawing the ire of the highway patrol. Pursued by a small army of cops, Kowalski is aided by blind radio personality Super Soul (Cleavon Little), who mythologizes Kowalski as “the last American hero” as he heads towards oblivion.

A surprise box-office hit with an anti-establishment stance, Vanishing Point helped establish the outlaw-folk hero and car-chase formula later used by populist road movies like Smokey And The Bandit (1977) and Convoy (1978), albeit with a much more ambiguous view of its hero. Unlike those films’ heroes, Kowalksi is a much more morally complicated character, played with a dead-eyed anti-charisma by Newman. Director Richard Sarafian credited much of the film’s success to future Chinatown (1974) cinematographer John Alonzo, who mounted lightweight handheld cameras on the Challenger to approximate the visceral thrills of being in a speeding muscle car.

Race With The Devil is a pulpy exercise in occult horror. It stars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as Roger and Frank, two buddies on vacation with their wives, driving across Texas in a state-of-the-art RV. After stumbling onto the site of a Satanic ritual, the couples are pursued by a sinister cabal that always seems to be one step ahead of them. A cheap composite of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Deliverance (1972), and The Wicker Man (1973) , the film presents a paranoid vision of rural America populated, seemingly entirely, by good-ol’-boy Satanists.

While the plot is extremely ludicrous, Race With The Devil is surprisingly effective at constantly ratcheting up the tension until it erupts in its violent high-velocity climax. Director Jack Starrett got his start acting in low-budget biker movies, and had a talent for both gritty action sequences and casting creepy-looking character actors like R.G. Armstrong (who plays Sheriff Taylor here). The film reunited Fonda and Oates, who first worked together on Fonda’s directorial debut, The Hired Hand (1971), and had immediately become close friends. Both had serious vehicle movie bona fides—a motorcycle enthusiast, Fonda became a countercultural icon with Easy Rider (1969) and did much of his own driving in the car-chase classic Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974); while Oates’ portrayal of The GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is one of the genre’s greatest performances. Though their characters in Race With The Devil are one-dimensional, their personal chemistry is obvious, and Oates’ weary gravitas lends the plot some much-needed credibility.

Based on a novel by sci-fi author Roger Zelazny, Damnation Alley is a 1970s Cold War vision of a post-apocalyptic future. In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack, the United States is utterly destroyed; blasts wipe out every major city and tilt the planet off its axis. Cut off from the rest of the world at a remote missile base, the mismatched team of Major Denton (George Peppard), hotshot rebel Tanner (Jan-Michael Vincent), and eccentric Keegan (the always delightful Paul Winfield) embark on a cross-country odyssey to find other survivors. Traveling by Landmaster, a giant, 12-wheeled military vehicle, the crew deals with mutant bugs, cataclysmic climate change, and their own mistrust of each other as they head towards the promised land (Albany).

Damnation Alley was supposed to be a big blockbuster for 20th Century Fox, but after extensive meddling from studio execs and exceeding the initial budget by a lot, the film was utterly obliterated at the box office by the success of Star Wars (1977). Studio interference could explain Damnation Alley‘s disjointed tone, at one point verging into unsettling horror before shifting into a much more family-friendly direction with the introduction of cloying orphan Billy (Jackie Earl Haley). The film’s visuals are similarly uneven, and often look more like a cheesy 1950s sci-fi movie than a big-budget spectacle. An early scene in the film features Tanner racing his motorcycle around giant scorpions that are clearly just normal-sized scorpions superimposed onto the screen. Despite its shortcomings, Damnation Alley is still fairly enjoyable, with some fun setpieces and a sweeping, synth-heavy score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Collectively considered, “part of what makes these films so American, of course, is our love of automobiles. We are a nation on wheels who shop, bank, sport, eat, drink, and make love in our cars… More than a means of transportation, they have always been a symbol, a dream, a way of life,” Andrew Horton wrote in his 1978 Cineaste essay, “Hot Car Films & Cool Individualism.” While car culture is still an omnipresent element in American life, its symbolic importance in the film medium has faded considerably since the 1970s. The death of the drive-in meant film studios stopped making films for the rural South, whose love of fast-car movies had largely driven the boom. The gas crisis and major missteps by the auto industry further dented the genre’s appeal.

While these movies could only have been made in the 1970s, the open road is a timeless cinematic device. The rough edges and anti-authoritarian attitudes of these films are welcome reminders of what filmmakers can do with just a camera and a speeding car.