Vanishing Point: The Last American Hero on Route

A man collects a white Dodge Challenger in Denver. He is a delivery driver; the car has to reach San Francisco. He takes amphetamines from a dealer, makes a bet about how fast he can do it, and leaves. Within a few hours he has state police behind him in three jurisdictions, and a blind disc jockey in a small Nevada town has begun broadcasting his position, his legend and his blessing.

Vanishing Point (1971) has one of the great unlikely production histories in American cinema, and the most unlikely fact is the smallest: the screenplay was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban novelist, exiled in London, working under a pen name. The man who wrote Tres tristes tigres wrote your favourite car chase. Once you know it, the film’s peculiar literary bones start showing through the tyre smoke.

The engine of it

The driver is called Kowalski. Barry Newman plays him, and Newman’s contribution is essentially a face and a set of shoulders — the performance is almost entirely reactive, and the film is designed that way. Kowalski does not explain himself to anybody. He answers questions with the minimum, drives, and takes more speed.

What the film gives us instead of interiority is a set of flashbacks, delivered in fragments: he raced motorcycles, he raced stock cars, he served in Vietnam, he was a policeman and was thrown off the force for intervening when a colleague assaulted a woman in custody, and a woman he loved died in the sea. Every American institution that could have held him has ejected him, and the film is careful to note that in each case he was ejected for being right.

This is where Cabrera Infante’s hand shows. Kowalski is not a character in the psychological sense; he is a figure, assembled from the wreckage of national mythologies — the cop, the soldier, the racer, the lover — and set in motion on a straight road. The flashbacks are not there to explain his behaviour. They are there to demonstrate that there is nothing left to explain.

Super Soul, and why the film has a narrator on the radio

Cleavon Little plays Super Soul, a blind DJ working a small station out in the Nevada desert. He picks up the police band, works out what is happening, and starts talking to Kowalski over the air — reporting roadblocks, celebrating him, giving him the name the film’s admirers have used ever since: the last American hero.

This is the film’s best idea and its most durable structural move. Super Soul does three separate jobs at once. He is the exposition, so nobody in the car has to talk. He is the chorus, elevating a traffic offence into myth in real time and letting the audience feel the elevation happening rather than being told it happened. And he is the film’s conscience — a blind Black man in a nowhere town, transmitting into a hostile landscape, watched with growing displeasure by the people who live around him.

Little plays him with an energy that leaves everyone else in the picture standing. The performance is doing something genuinely difficult: he has to make a man alone in a booth into the film’s emotional centre while the actual protagonist is a mute in a car three hundred miles away, and he manages it because he is talking to Kowalski with the sincerity of a man praying.

Why it works: the score is inside the world

The music in Vanishing Point comes out of the car radio. That is the entire scoring philosophy and it is the reason the film still plays.

Because Super Soul is broadcasting and Kowalski is listening, the soundtrack is diegetic — the rock and gospel and country that carry the film are in the world, coming from a transmitter to a receiver at ninety miles an hour. A conventional score sits above a film and instructs you. This one is a physical object being received by the protagonist, which means every music cue is simultaneously a plot event. When the broadcast changes, the score changes, and the change is something that has happened to Kowalski rather than something the film has decided you should feel.

The photography is by John A. Alonzo, three years before he shot Chinatown, and it is the other half of the achievement. Alonzo shoots the American desert as a flat, over-lit, unromantic expanse — heat haze, white sky, the road as a scratch across nothing. There is no golden hour mysticism here. The landscape is not beautiful and does not care, and the white car crossing it reads as a single moving particle. That refusal of grandeur is what keeps the mythology from becoming ridiculous: the film can call Kowalski the last American hero precisely because everything around him looks like a car park.

The real ancestor

It is a western. Not loosely — structurally, beat for beat. A man who cannot live inside the law rides into open country; a posse forms; the community he passes through is composed of eccentrics, hermits and true believers; the frontier is closing behind him; there is a snake and an old man in the desert who represent the country as it was. Swap the Challenger for a horse and Vanishing Point would be perfectly legible to a 1953 audience. Cabrera Infante, writing from London about a country he was looking at from the outside, produced the most classically shaped western of 1971 and put an engine in it.

Its sibling is Two-Lane Blacktop, released within months, and the pairing is the most instructive double bill of the decade. Monte Hellman withholds everything — no score, no backstory, no meaning. Sarafian and Cabrera Infante give you all of it: the backstory, the radio prophet, the myth, the elegy. They are the same film with the volume at zero and at eleven, and the fact that both arrived in the same year tells you exactly how uncertain American cinema was about whether the road meant something. Electra Glide in Blue turned up two years later to ask the question from the police car.

Downstream, this film’s DNA is everywhere. The car as a character with more presence than the driver runs through to Carpenter’s killer Plymouth. The near-silent wheelman with a code and no biography is Refn’s driver almost without alteration. And Tarantino built a whole half of Death Proof around a white Challenger, with the reference stated out loud, because he assumed his audience would know.

The case against

The counterculture furniture has dated badly. The desert encounters — the sect, the naked motorcyclist, the hitchhikers — are a tour of 1971’s idea of the alternative America, and they play now as a montage of things that were briefly fashionable. They stop the film dead. Every time Kowalski meets someone, the picture gets worse, and every time he is alone on the road it gets better, which suggests the screenplay’s episodic structure is at odds with its own strengths.

The flashbacks are the other problem. They are clumsily cut in and they explain too much. Kowalski is more frightening as an unaccounted-for object; giving him four separate tragedies edges the film toward the sentimental proposition that he is a good man wronged by America, which is much smaller than what the driving itself implies.

And Barry Newman, honestly, is furniture. He is well-chosen furniture. But the film’s reputation rests on Cleavon Little, John Alonzo and a Dodge, and its nominal lead is the least interesting thing in any frame he occupies.

Where to find it

It stays in print and turns up constantly in repertory. Two versions circulate: the UK release includes a night-time hitchhiker scene with Charlotte Rampling, cut from the American release for making the film’s hand too visible. Both cuts are defensible. The American one is more mysterious; the British one is more honest about the mystery.

Spoilers below

Super Soul’s fate is the film’s real tragedy and the thing that lifts it above its imitators. The local men who have been listening to a blind Black DJ turn a police chase into a folk hero decide they have heard enough. They come to the station and beat him, and the broadcast that follows — Super Soul back on air under supervision, reading out what he has been told to read, feeding Kowalski false information about the road ahead — is the bleakest sequence in the picture. The chorus is captured and turned. The myth-making apparatus is seized by the posse and pointed at the man it was built to protect.

Which brings the film to Cisco, California, and the roadblock: two bulldozers, parked nose to nose across the highway, with a crowd gathered and cameras waiting. Kowalski comes over the rise and sees them.

He smiles, and accelerates.

The film has spent ninety minutes refusing to say what he is driving toward, and the answer is that there was never a destination — the delivery was a pretext, the bet was a pretext, San Francisco was a pretext. Everything that could have held him had already let go before the film started. The bulldozers are simply the first thing in Nevada or California that has bothered to stop him, and he takes them at speed because stopping is the only thing left that he has not tried.

Sarafian shoots the impact without commentary. There is an explosion, a crowd, and the peculiar anticlimax of a myth becoming a traffic incident.

The blackly funny coda is what happened afterwards. This film has been claimed for decades by car culture as a celebration of speed and freedom — a poster on a thousand garage walls, a Challenger in every homage. It is an unbroken ninety-minute argument that the freedom in question is worth precisely nothing, and its central image is a man happily driving into a wall because the country has run out of road. Cabrera Infante, watching from exile, knew exactly what he was writing. The audience took the car and left the argument.