Sundays with Spielberg: 'The Sugarland Express'
Spielberg hits the road in his theatrical debut.
There is a shot late in The Sugarland Express that ranks among the best in Steven Spielberg’s filmography.
Outlaws Clovis and Lou-Jean Poplin have hidden themselves in a car dealership parking lot for the night. They retire to an RV, marvel at the gas stove and laugh about the domesticity they’ve scrounged in the middle of their escape. They retire to the bedroom and watch a Wile E. Coyote cartoon play at the drive-in across the parking lot. Clovis makes cartoon noises to compensate for the lack of sound.
Spielberg captures the shot from outside the RV as Clovis watches out the window, the cartoon reflected in the glass. As he watches the coyote try to outwit the Road Runner only for the ground to drop out beneath him, the smile leaves Clovis’ face, replaced by uncertainty and dread. For the last hour, Spielberg’s shown the duo outwit police as they race across Texas. But the scene is the hinge on which the entire film turns, imbuing what has been a lighthearted comedy with a sense of doom and suggesting that it won’t be long before Clovis and Lou-Jean run out of road.
Hitting the road
The Sugarland Express doesn’t get mentioned much. It’s not iconic, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. But it’s also not lumped in with his stumbles, like 1941 or Always. It’s often lost in the conversation, almost with the thought that anything before Jaws doesn’t count. It received solid reviews when it was released and made $7.5 million at the box office, released in a year that included The Conversation, The Godfather Part II and Blazing Saddles, among others. Spielberg would go on to change the industry in just one year with his shark picture, so it’s easy to see this as a simple throat-clearing, a piffle he had to get out of the way before delivering the classics.
And The Sugarland Express often feels like a lark. It follows a young woman who breaks her husband out of prison just months before his release, hitting the road and kidnapping a police officer as they seek to get their son from his foster parents. Along the way, they outwit police and get in a variety of scrapes and close escapes; the film is a series of shootouts, police chases and vignettes that allow Clovis and Lou-Jean to wiggle their way out of danger.
Spielberg moves on from the focused intensity of Duel to tell a story that is a bit more sprawling and character-focused, while still allowing him to revel in chases, crashes and excitement. It’s often fleet-footed, moving with energy and humor, and Spielberg’s knack for visual comedy is already on display (there’s a great gag involving a slow driver early on that is funnier than when Dumb and Dumber eventually ripped it off).
Goldie Hawn is particularly strong as Lou-Jean, a mother determined to get her baby back but also convinced that she can outrun her outlaw past and create an honest family life built on Texas Gold Stamps and petty larceny. Hawn is charismatic and funny; there’s a reason why the Texas Marshall who serves as their hostage (played by Michael Sacks) eventually finds himself sharing photos of himself with her and warming to the couple. Hawn brings nuance to Lou-Jean. Yes, the character is naïve and has not fully thought through the obstacles that she and Clovis face, but she’s also determined to get her baby. She’s a force of nature; it’s fear of her disapproval that keeps Clovis going even when he knows the best outcome would be for him to run himself in, and it’s her goading and misplaced optimism that ultimately spell tragedy for the couple in the film’s final stretch.
Atherton (most famous for his “dickless” EPA agent Walter Peck in Ghostbusters and smarmy television reporter Richard Thornburg in Die Hard) paints Clovis as simple, a man who isn’t a criminal at heart but rather has stumbled in and out of trouble because he isn’t sure how to live any other way. He was perfectly content to serve out the remaining three months of his sentence, but he’s led along by Lou-Jean out of fear of losing her. He sees her clearly enough to know that her hopes are misplaced, but too passive to do anything about it.
Conflicted sympathies
Spielberg’s sympathies don’t necessarily lie with the Poplins and, instead, with Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), the head of the Texas State Police who is tasked with stopping Lou-Jean and Clovis and getting his man back safely. Right down to the white hat on his head, Tanner is portrayed as the hero of the story. He notes that the outlaws are “just kids” and seems bemused at the ways they outwit his men. He asks the sharpshooters who volunteer to take them out to stand down and berates vigilantes who seek to bring justice on their own. At a time when his colleagues were making countercultural road movies that screamed “eff the man,” Spielberg takes the man’s side and sticks his Bonnie and Clyde characters in the middle of an old-fashioned police story. In the film’s other celebrated shot, Spielberg uses a windshield and a rearview mirror to capture all of his protagonists in one take, with Tanner watching the outlaws drive ahead of them, Lou-Jean smiling sweetly and the captain’s eyes soft with empathy.
Spielberg views Lou-Jean and Clovis as young lovers whose naivety dooms them. They may have some fun on the road trying to outwit their captors; and they may indeed get most of the way to Sugarland. But sooner or later, he knows that if they continue on their path, it can only end in heartache. That’s what the scene with the drive-in theater expresses, the terror of road about to run out.
And that theme of “if only they’d listen to the cops” is a strange one to come out of New Hollywood.
Too many detours
The story of a doomed optimism is tantalizing, but Spielberg never fully commits to it, especially after Clovis and Lou-Jean leave that parking lot. He becomes too interested in car crashes, smashups and shootouts, delving into satire of local vigilantes before briefly trying to critique fame culture by having Clovis and Lou-Jean become heroes to folks in the towns they pass through. But it’s a quick detour and the attempt to lay the blame on the media never really sticks.
The film ends in a tragic finish that finds Clovis gunned down outside the foster home by aggressive sharp-shooters. But the tone is not that the sharp-shooters were overzealous; it’s framed as Tanner having no other option than to stop the Poplins before they could reach the finish line (even though their son has been moved to safety shortly before). Again, it ties into the theme of misplaced optimism and tragic hope, but because it’s not Tanner making the final move and the audience is well aware that the Poplins can’t succeed, it plays again as paternalistic and condescending (“look at what they made the poor cops do.”). The film’s final shot involves Tanner and his newly freed deputy shaking hands and debriefing by the water, ending the movie with law enforcement coming to terms with the story instead of focusing on Lou-Jean. It’s a deflating denouement.
As such, The Sugarland Express never lands the emotional punch Spielberg would later perfect. Its strongest passages are in the beginning, when the film is a lighthearted and often funny action caper. By its final half hour, Spielberg is too devoted to the machinations of the plot and the logistics of showing dozens of cars racing down the highway (shots The Blues Brothers would later parody) to bring the human stories in for proper closure. The film is too flawed to be classic, and yet Spielberg’s filmmaking takes strong steps forward, particularly in his shot composition and storytelling (the director rarely gets the credit he deserves for his visual humor). Its entertaining, but it can’t help but feel like another obligatory road picture before the director would get his sea legs.
Previous Sundays with Spielberg entries: