Essay: The Sugarland Express (1974)
Steven Spielberg's first feature launches Goldie Hawn into stardom -- and reveals the real Texas
Another in a series of reviews and essays on the films of my youth, 1970-1980
The Sugarland Express (1974)
Directed and co-written1 by Steven Spielberg
In the early 1970s I was living in a new suburban development south of Houston, in the flat coastal pastures on Texas’s Gulf Coast. When my family moved there I was 13, and so far I was disappointed in the world that adults had fashioned. None of their institutions that I had glumly participated in — Boy Scouts, Little League, the Lutheran church — had lived up to promises.
Before arriving in Texas I knew nothing about it, but I was fully prepared, to the extent that it was supposed to be a change of scenery, for Texas to disappoint me as well. On our arrival I saw no horses and few cattle, only a string of subdivisions and shopping centers arrayed along something called NASA Road 1, a glorified farm-to-market road that ran next to the space agency’s headquarters. Except for that installation, which — again I was underwhelmed — resembled a recently built state college campus without the trees, it seemed that Texas was going to turn out to be just like the Midwest my family had left.
So when I walked into school for the first time and heard an abundance of twangy Texas accents, I thought they were putting me on — like, here’s the new kid, let’s play up the stereotype and see if he falls for it. But I wasn’t going to. “Come on, you guys, you don’t have to do that. I get the joke,” I said.
They stared at me, offended. One kid answered — in retrospect, it was much less of a hostile response than I deserved: “Wull… whar YEW from — Anglun’??”
What I eventually found out, during the almost ten years I lived there, was that Texans, while sounding exactly like you’d expect, and being generally good-humored, well-meaning, and credulous — the expression used to describe a typical Texan was “good ol’ boy” — had a genuine quality. Hospitality, whether they referred to it as “southern” or not, was widespread. Older men called younger men “son.” If you were asked a question, you were expected to give a straight answer.
The kind of passive-aggressive bullshit you hear from non-urban Americans nowadays2 just wasn’t done. As for my classmates, they neither knew what a stereotype was, nor did they have any exposure to the level of humor that would play up a stereotype for the sake of satire.
I go on at length because viewing of “The Sugarland Express” requires the viewer to see this good-hearted quality in one of the main characters, a young Texas highway patrolman named Slide, played by Michael Sacks. When we first meet him, he’s transporting a local drunk to jail on a DUI. He doesn’t humiliate the talkative drunk (hilariously performed by Buster Daniels who, if his part were any larger, might have earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination); he doesn’t tell him to shut up; he carries on a comic conversation, not about whether the man was weaving when he pulled him over, but whether or not the man has ever been drunk, ever. When (still with his arrestee in the back seat) he follows a couple of car thieves on a wild chase through the countryside until they crash, his first impulse is to rescue the unconscious driver, not pull his gun as any cop would do nowadays. And even when the car thieves kidnap him in his patrol car and lead a parade of cops across the state, he continues to be decent to them, and even seems to forget, from time to time, that he’s not their friend.
This blending or melding of the positions of criminal and victim, or criminal and cop, was a not-uncommon trope in movies of the 1970s. It would often play up the righteousness and virtue of whatever reason or cause lay behind the kidnapping in the first place. Here it makes the viewer identify with and root for the foolish young couple. We see it in “Dog Day Aftenoon” (1975) as the bank employees come to see their captors as human. But even when there is no cause to be stood up for, as in “The Last Detail” (1972), in which two military policemen relax their control over the sailor they’re taking to prison and get him drunk and laid on his last day of freedom, the humanity of all the characters is emphasized.
But to the main action. The car thieves turned cop kidnappers are a young couple. Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) has been out of “the women’s facility” (jail or hospital, it’s not clear) for a few weeks and wants to reclaim their toddler son before he’s taken out of state and put up for adoption. Her husband Clovis Poplin (William Atherton) is still in prison for stealing, but she doesn’t want to wait the four months he has left on his sentence. She strides into his “pre-release” facility, where families are socializing with their soon-to-be-released son or uncle or cousin, and insists he walk out of the place so he can go with her and reclaim their son.
Nobody’s watching very carefully, and despite his misgivings, he allows her to bundle him out of there. (I imagine these pre-release facilities were tightened up soon after the film came out.) And soon enough they have kidnapped the affable state trooper Slide — car, firearms, Stetson and all — in what is obviously, from the first moment, a doomed misson.
Because there’s no way they’re going to get that toddler. Viewers know that long before they kidnap Slide and acquire a dozen, then three dozen, then fifty trailing cop cars and television vans; they know as soon as Lou Jean tells her convict husband that that’s their mission. Because she, as Goldie Hawn plays her, is clearly a manipulative psychopath who will cry or seduce her way into getting whatever she wants. It’s she who emotionally manipulates her husband into the prison break (“Nobody busts out of pre-release!” exclaims a fellow prisoner, in what has proved an unforgettable line — it’s the one line I remembered for 45 years between the first time I saw this movie, in 1977, and today). It’s she who plays possum when the trooper pulls her out of the crashed car and hefts her on his shoulder (“Just tell me if I’m hurting you,” he reassures her); she returns the favor by reaching down and stealing his holstered revolver.
Thus begins their odessey across Texas.3 Aside from crossing the occasional freeway, where an ARCO station looks like a visitor from the future, the state depicted in the film is entirely rural, composed alternately of forests and pastures — which is what much of Texas really looked like then (suburban developments encroach everywhere in the last 50 years, no place more than in Texas). As the film progresses, they get farther and farther west;. though the real Sugar Land, Tex. is in east Texas, the fictional Sugarland where Lou Jean’s child is being looked after is in west Texas, only a few miles from the Rio Grande and their ultimate destination, Mexico.
Goldie Hawn is so good in this movie. She was well known to American television audiences because of her appearances in the 60s on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” and she had appeared in a number of movies before this. Here she is fascinating just reading a catalog — a catalog of things you could get after collecting enough Gold Stamps from supermarkets and gas stations, and she collects (steals) stamps as they go along in order to get a bassinet or crib.
She is obsessive and requires attention and approval, and she’ll do anything to get it. The trauma at the center of her character is not explained, though we get a hint when the Highway Patrol captain leading their pursuit puts her father on the police radio. “Lou Jean, you have never been any good. I knew you’d never amount to nothin’. If I could, I would go down there and shoot you myself.” Okay then.
The character of the police captain, played by Ben Johnson — you know him as the aging rancher in “The Last Picture Show,” a role for which he won an Oscar — provides an adult presence throughout. He seems to look on Lou Jean with fatherly affection, and would prefer to get through the rest of his police career without being involved in a death. Nice idea.
Above all, this is a Steven Spielberg movie, with its numerous car stunts, its faithful depiction of ordinary peoples’ lives, and perfectly balanced shares of action and slow scenes. It’s amazing how much information first-time director Spielberg is already capable of transmitting through the camera alone without the benefit of dialogue. When the stolen cop car with its kidnapped trooper slows down in small towns where huge crowds have gathered to gawk at the criminals, Speilberg shows not only the generosity of ordinary people but their grasping, unfillable hunger to be connected to something they can never be: famous, if only for a day. They yank the sunglasses that Poplin has taken from the trooper right off the kidnapper’s face, thrust a pet piglet into their car, and greedily hold their hands out for Gold Stamps.
I knew just what they felt. Before we moved to Texas we lived in an entirely anonymous small town in Illinois. One day the Goodyear blimp flew past the town. Not over the town, but on its way someplace else, yet still recognizable. It was something we’d seen on TV: it was therefore real in a way that nothing and no one in the town could ever hope to become.
So the film is about a doomed dream cherished by a damaged girl, and about the way a police chase of a couple of sympathetic criminals can consume the attention of ordinary people and transform them into a mob (we see this echoed in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”). And about the way simple decency can survive a trip with a psychopath, even when it can’t save her.
Full writing credits: Screenplay by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins; story by Steven Spielberg, Hal Barwood, and Matthew Robbins
Like when you ask a simple question like “How much will it cost to fix my flat tire?” and they answer “Oh, we’re closed today” when they’re obviously open, or “Five hundred dollars” which is ridiculous, and all you can say is “What?” and then they go “HAW HAW just kiddin’!” as if it was the funniest thing ever
I feel obliged to point out that the Beauford H. Jester Unit III of the Texas Department of Corrections is less than 10 miles from the real town of Sugar Land (as it’s actually spelled), but for the purposes of the film the fictional Sugarland is so far away across the state that it takes them overnight to get there.