Vanishing Point is a great film….

Steven Spielberg named it as one of his favorite films. It’s also one of my favorite films.  Spielberg has good taste in movies.  I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma City and it was January, 1971.  I was, still am, and will take to the grave a love of movies that are not of the ordinary, the bland, the mundane. Get the point? The Vanishing Point?  This movie is just the opposite. It was not ordinary, bland or mundane.

It was my Woodstock framed in a 98 minute movie of anti-establishment of a fast car, a Wolfman Jack DJ, great music, and a true American film in which the crazy driver tells the law to f… off.

At 18 years old, you didn’t need anything else in a movie.  Vanishing Point was Quinton Tarantino’s “Grindhouse” forty years earlier. It is bold and bawdy.  It is in-your-face up yours film making of the highest order.  It is the counter culture of McQueen’s “Bullitt.”  The Dodge Challenger for the entire psychotic screen presentation is the real character and Barry Newman the driver is along for the ride of his life.

 
Add Oklahoma’s (Chickasha) own Clevon Little, music by Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, a snake charming Dean Jagger and the great Southwestern part of the US, what more can you want.  Richard C. Sarafian, thanks for your direction.

A first-rate B movie that is now a cult-classic, Vanishing Point was and is the real deal.   A perfect double-feature would be this film and Two-Lane-Blacktop………