Director: Dennis Hopper
Cast: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black
Have I Seen it Before: Yeah…
Did I Like It: This film might very well be the single greatest argument for the auteur theory. The entire experience is what one imagines having a conversation with Dennis Hopper must have been like, especially at that time. It’s digressive and almost always chaotic. The only real passages which feel like a real movie taking flight are those where Jack Nicholson incontrovertibly introduced himself to the world as a movie star for the ages.
And yet, there are occasional moments of profundity. The palpable discomfort—their most rational thought by the time the film comes to a sudden stop—of the nonconformist has never and likely will never be depicted with such lethal efficiency. Even if the complaints of the so-called normal people have become somewhat quaint—to say nothing of the fact that Hopper’s own politics would take a 180 degree turn over the years—the feelings associated with those interactions keep the film surprisingly fresh, more than fifty years later.
Also, after an hour and a half, it still feels like it’s gone on far too long and you’re not entirely sure what the whole thing was about. The prolonged sequence in New Orleans is so aggressively odd, that I’m left wondering if Hopper was a genius, a madman, both, or an absolutely bore pretending to be brilliant and insane. In an effort to try and answer to that question, I even went ahead and listened to Hopper’s commentary tracks. Aside from his warm remarks about Phil Spector, I’m no closer to understanding the man or the film for which he is most remembered.
Maybe that’s the point? Perhaps Hopper hated being pigeonholed so much that his film about rebellion couldn’t help but rebel against the idea of being much of a movie at all.