Every movie (really, every work of art) is a product of the time and place it was made in, and inevitably it can’t be understood in the same way by people who weren’t there for it. An obvious fact, but I mention it here, because this movie really really really is a product of its time and place, to the point where it offers very little to contemporary audiences, and you almost have to dig into its historical context if you want to unlock any value from it at all.

Which is a place where I really love Roger Ebert, because he has not only a contemporaneous review from 1969, but also a retrospective one from 2004. And so from him, I learned that “motorcycle movies” were a whole-ass genre, and that this movie was notable not merely for being a motorcycle movie, but for being a subversive one that undermined genre expectations.

But reading old reviews will let you understand intellectually the context a movie was born in, but it can’t make you feel it. Whatever thrill was felt by rebellious youths at seeing this movie on the screen, there’s not much of it left here in modernity, where motorcycles and the US flag[1] are both now symbols of older people, not youthful rebellion.

What’s left of this movie in modernity is basically a shaggy road movie. There are sequences of gorgeous American landscapes with pop hits playing over them, separated by episodic interludes as our two cyclists (who briefly become three with the arrival of Jack Nicholson’s lawyer, the performance which apparently made him a star) arrive at various destinations, get high, and say/do a bunch of dumb shit, before going back on the road. Rinse and repeat, until the movie ends in an essentially meaningless tragedy that the writers seemingly threw in just because it’s how the movies that this cribs from all end.

Does this movie belong on the AFI list? As a movie, I think clearly no; there’s nothing this movie does that Bonnie and Clyde isn’t doing better. As a historical artifact, it makes a stronger case… but ’60s/’70s youthful rebellion is honestly very well-represented on the list already (including, for instance, another Jack Nicholson performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). I think it’s skippable, and if they ever make an update of the list, the people who were 18-22 in 1969 will mostly not be involved in the making of it, and it’s hard to imagine that a younger generation will feel any real excitement for this.

  1. (Aside about the flag: There’s a sequence where a bunch of small-town Southerners get really mad at our protagonists, almost entirely because their hair is long (which it’s hard to believe ever used to be a serious thing), but also because they had the American flag, the combination of which made them out to be, apparently, “Yankee [homophobic slurs].” In an era where rural conservatives all over the country, including the South, have become huge flag-wavers, it’s weird to think that the semiotics of the flag were still geographically polarized this recently.) ↩︎