‘I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace…’
At the start of 2018 I produced a list of films that I was going to attempt to watch before the year was out. We are now eight months in to my allocated time and I have managed to watch three of them. Slow and steady wins the race…
The numerous stories around the production of Easy Rider are arguably more entertaining than the film itself. Most of the film was unscripted as Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made it up as they went along. They didn’t hire a crew, instead deciding to pick up local hippies along the way to hold the cameras and, according to Jack Nicholson, Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson himself went through 155 joints when filming the campfire scene. That sounds like a wild night. The result of all this madness is a film that is certainly iconic but is also wayward and aimless in places.
Other than the Beatles films, Easy Rider was one of the first movies to use popular music as a backing track rather than having a score, and the film utilises this fledgling technique to perfection. The image of a wild-eyed Dennis Hopper straddling his motorbike to the sound of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’ is as famous as any in American cinema and tracks by the likes of The Byrds, The Band and Jimi Hendrix round off a classic soundtrack.
Despite their haphazard methods, the acting is solid everywhere with a demented Dennis Hopper the perfect counterweight to the more measured Peter Fonda. Elsewhere, while Jack Nicholson is only onscreen for a grand total of 17 minutes, he still shows glimpses of the acting juggernaut that he would later become.
I personally don’t think that Easy Rider is a masterpiece but it is a time capsule. A perfect rendering of the ’60s counter culture that has influenced everything in popular culture since then. Actors, musicians, models, everyone still wants to look like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and it was with this film that Hopper and Fonda captured the zeitgeist of an unforgettable time in modern history. At little over 90 minutes, it is one of those films that everyone should have seen and to end on a dark note, it was also Charlie Manson’s favourite movie. Make of that what you will…