Word: hoppers
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Besides collaborating with Dennis Hopper on Easy Rider, Peter Fonda has directed one previous movie, a fine, elegiac western called The Hired Hand (1971). Like that earlier effort, Idaho Transfer has a grave, lovely feeling for the contours of the countryside. There is also, as in The Hired Hand, a simple, quite ravishing musical score by Bruce Langhorne, which mixes acoustic instrumentation with electronic effects. The scores of these two films alone should establish Langhorne as one of the best young pop musicians in the country. He is, hands down, one of the best film composers...
...stops to notice: a defacing web of electric and telephone wires across California's lovely Owens Valley, an empty parking lot behind a blank-walled movie theater in Paramus, N.J., an ugly carwash building in Lorain, Ohio. Each photo is as carefully composed as a painting by Edward Hopper, and disappointment clearly shows in each. Turning to the great achievements of the past, Plowden finds little consolation. The splendid ferries and mighty iron bridges that he loves to photograph are obsolescent and vanishing. In Lordville, N.Y., he shows a once proud but now decaying house by some railroad tracks...
...lost and responsibilities evaded. Director-Writer Charles Eastman (best known previously as the author of the screenplay for Little Fans and Big Halsey) evokes, in the character of Vic, the kind of wary protagonist whose abdication of personal responsibility made anti-heroes out of Dean and Brando, Fonda and Hopper. The film builds to a crazy, disorganized hillside ceremony in which the entire town of Buddy, Calif., comes to cheer its boy Vic off to the nationals. Vic sees it all as a shuck, refuses to go and hits the road out of town, pursued by his new fiancee Drenna...
...most praised tricks in Traffic--the superposition of characters on an Edward Hopper painting of a restaurant or a Godfather parody in which the Mafia leader is shot up while eating spaghetti, are heavy-handed by comparison. The device of framing the film with shots of the cartoonist Michael at his favorite pinball machine is intended to serve as a metaphor for Bakshi's brand of East Village existentialism but since Tommy it's a pretty trite trick. The conventional film segments at the end only expose the paucity of the caricatures and if Bakshi is forced already...
...entire generation, not to mention a generation of cinema, and Dean became a cult hero overnight. His talent is both marvelous and overwhelming, and the supporting cast is understated enough not to cramp his style. Natalie Wood, Jim Backus, Sal Mineo, Edward "Chief" Platt, and William "Paul Drake" Hopper all perform creditably in Dean's all-encompassing shadow. Even if you have seen this film four times before, see it again, for one reason: in the scene where Dean and Natalie Wood are at the old house for the first time, he does an unbelievably good imitation of Mr. Magoo...