Vanishing Point

If you have never come across Vanishing Point I cant urge you more to add this to your DVD rental list. The 1971 film is a pretentious existential road movie that features a hero known only by his surname Kowalski, speeding across the American landscape both literally and metaphorically, as he pumps himself full of amphetamines. If this doesn’t sound much fun the protagonists driving a 1970 Dodge Challenger from Colorado to San Francisco with the police in pursuit and one of the best soundtracks to the early seventies playing on the radio, what more do you need? The film's lead, Barry Numan (later to star as TV’s Pettrocelli the attorney who lived in a caravan) might not be a Peter Fonda or Jack Nicholson but is just as a important icon of counter culture cinema. He might only have a handful of lines but his face says it all. The other star of the film is DJ Super Soul a radio DJ who picks up on Kowalski’s police chase and starts talking to him over the airwaves. This guys got the best radio show you never heard.



Vanishing Point was post Woodstock but pre Watergate a time when the counter culture revolution was dieing, the world wasn’t changing for the better and cynicism was setting in, confusion and the death of innocence abound. During the journey we see flashbacks to Kowalski’s previous life and the viewer floats in and out of these memories. As with any good road movie the cast of characters we meet along the way is just as important as the landscape, some sequences in Vanishing point reach almost Lynchian standards of oddness. The standouts being a crazy old rattler catcher in the desert and a naked hippy biker chick, you can feel the pounding hangover from the sixties kicking in. Here’s the original trailer for the film.



and don’t look if you have not seen the film before – the Vanishing Point finale




Primal Scream were such fans of the film they named an album after it featuring the track Kowalski. Picks up the vibe of the film pretty well.
Primal Scream - Kowalski (New Edit)