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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Steven Spielberg's first true theatrical feature film The Sugarland Express didn't make much money. It was a minor success since with the budget of just 3 million dollars it was able to gather 12 million in box office. But it is nothing like his next film Jaws, which on a budget of just 9 million made a whopping 495 million in box office. Yet with all that said The Sugarland Express is still a very interesting movie to try to take apart.

Based on the opinion of Joseph McBride who wrote a biography of Steven Spielberg, a copy of which I have, the film has a strange kind of sexist undertone to it. The main character Lou Jean, played by Goldie Hawn is kind of the reason the whole plot ( with all it's problems ) begins in the first place. She seems to utterly impulsive that everything goes to shit as soon as she enters the frame. McBride has a theory about why that is. In his opinion Spielberg is trying to process his own mother ( who was not the most normalest of people ) through the character of Lou Jean. If you seen Spielberg's 2022 semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, you know the kind of crazy character his mother could be. And the character Lou Jean is not much crazier than his mother. I mean she is crazier. But not much crazier. There is a kind of similarity ( almost ) between the two characters, which seems almost uncanny, given how many years passed between 1974 and 2022.

Like, here is an example: In the beginning of the film Lou Jean meets with her husband Clovis ( William Atherton ) in a pre-release facility. He just spent some time in jail and soon he goes free. He is already in a lower security pre-release. What does she do? She breaks him out of there. Who breaks out of pre-release? That obviously makes them very nervous and sets of a chain of evens leading to a movie-long chase. If Lou Jean had more patience, maybe non of it would have happened in the first place?

Even though this is technically a 2 hour long chase scene movie, the chase scene in question is not high-speed. This is not Michael Bay's Ambulance. Most of the film, there is this silly atmosphere of a joke chase. The cars are slow. And the chase is very calm, for the most part. It's just that our main characters are holding a police office hostage, making the rest of the police-force unable to do anything about their situation.

That said, though, the scale of the film isn't small at all. Spielberg uses his Hollywood sensibilities to maximize every ounce of production value possible. There are shots with often so many cars that it is hard to comprehend. As one character points out in the film "We have the whole state of Texas here". The chase, even though slow, is absolutely and utterly massive.

So is the complexity of some of the stuff Spielberg goes for, when it comes to directing. I'm not going to pretend that The Sugarland Express is the best directed movie from Spielberg. It is not. Even Jaws is already a million times more polished than this film. And the stuff Spielberg does these days doesn't see this film in a mile. But that said, the film is rather fucking impressive.

This is what I mean by "Disappointing Impressiveness". Compared to any other director it is a directing masterpiece. But compared to other works by Spielberg himself, it is kind of lame. The film is not lame. It is fucking insane, how good it is. It is just kind of lame, as a Spielberg film.

Spielberg goes for some rather complex shots of people in cars. He is not content with simple basic car coverage expect-able from movies of that time. He doesn't do rear-projection car shots. He goes for complex camera moves and compositions of moving vehicles on the road. In one dialogue scene, they talk over the radio with another vehicle. And we see both our protagonists and that other vehicle ( with the person talking on the radio ) all in the same time, in one shot. While they are driving down the road.

What is lacking is not complexity of the shots or massiveness of production. This the film has plenty of it. But the signature Spielberg flow. The movie struggles when it comes to pacing. Scenes don't flow naturally one into another as with modern Spielberg films. The editing feels almost strangely primitive.

It doesn't help that John Williams ( with whom Spielberg collaborated for the first time on this movie ) made a very strange soundtrack for the film. It does not sound like a John Williams score. You hear a guitar and some percussion. Nothing that you might expect from John Williams. And it's not like John Williams didn't know what he was doing. Literally the next year, for Jaws he made one of the coolest scores of his carrier. But this score, the score of The Sugarland Express sounds like they didn't have money to record anything proper. Yet in the same time, they have the money to put on screen an enormous amount of vehicles. And do rather complex stunts and stupidly insane shots.

This movie causes a sort of strange cognitive dissonance. You have a young director doing an insane piece of work. Yet because you know what this director will be capable of in the future, you are still somehow disappointed in all of that. Strange, strange movie...

Happy Hacking!!!


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