“The Sugarland Express” (1974)
Steven Spielberg’s theatrical feature debut is based, very loosely, on a true story, but despite the uncharacteristically downbeat ending, you can already see the evolution of the filmmaker Spielberg would become—for better (technical prowess) and worse (sentimentality). Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) breaks her husband Clovis (William Atherton) out of low-security prison with the shortsighted idea that they can steal their baby son away from his foster parents and be a “real, ordinary family.” Early on they take a young police officer hostage on their journey, which attracts a disproportionate mount of police attention (a caravan of squad cars 100-strong), media celebrity, and local-hero status. While the real story featured no jailbreak and reportedly the visiting-the-child aspect was an afterthought, Spielberg and his screenwriters (who won the Cannes Best Screenplay award, surprisingly) are unambiguous in their intentions for us to sympathize with the cinematic equivalent from the get-go, making Lou Jean a misguided but fiercely loving mother and the tragic victim of an uncaring system, and having the affable young cop gradually become a friend and ally to his captors. In fact everyone, right down to the police captain in charge of the manhunt, is portrayed as so fundamentally likeable and decent, that the stakes are rarely felt (so the end seems doubly unjustified,) and for the most part the film is played as a zany picaresque adventure. Especially in the pacier second half, this aspect works quite well as the growing disparity between the efforts to contain the pair and their obvious harmlessness throws up some ironic comment: at one point a town they’re due to journey through holds an actual parade in their honor, with crowds of locals cheering them and strewing the car with presents for the baby. Spielberg handles the car crashes, crowd scenes and rare shootouts like a pro—already his technical proficiency is on display—but the characterization suffers and occasionally the attempts to humanize and normalize the Poplins come across as patronizing, like Lou Jean’s myopic obsession with collecting Gold Stamps from gas stations, or her insistence on putting curlers in her hair. So strangely it feels like Spielberg’s nascent sentimentality actually ends up undercutting any real feeling we have for the pair, and the denouement (which is itself undercut by a postscript that insists things kinda worked out after all) plays out a bit like discovering an inexplicable piece of grit in your bubblegum. [B-]
“Something Wild” (1986)
Jonathan Demme‘s totally bonkers “Something Wild” is a testament to the lengths men will go to in order to impress a girl, to the point of changing everything about themselves. In this case it’s Jeff Daniels, who plays a straitlaced banker, who falls for Melanie Griffith (at her absolute cutest). You can feel his desperate desire to impress her from the very beginning, so when the two run away together (in a car she’s stolen), it doesn’t seem absurd, it seems natural: these are the lengths this guy is going to go to just to try and impress her. “Something Wild” is beautifully shot by longtime Demme collaborator Tak Fujimoto and has an amazingly vivid soundtrack that features tons of popular New Wave bands of the day, emphasizing the freewheeling “fuck it” attitude of the whole movie. Anyone who has fallen in love with someone you know isn’t right for you (and wanted to follow them anyway) can identify with “Something Wild,” no matter how crazy it gets. The movie becomes darker and more unpredictable as it goes along, especially when Ray Liotta shows up as Griffith’s estranged husband (emphasis on the strange), leading to a wholly unexpected climax. But right before the credits start to roll, the quirky romanticism of the rest of the movie returns, and it’s hard not to swoon again. As a lovers on the run movie, it’s a sweet, goofy, thoroughly modern tale about a square dude who wants to impress a cool girl, no matter the consequences. A tale as old as time, really. [B]
“Pierrot Le Fou” (1965)
Jean-Luc Godard would revisit the theme of doomed lovers on the run, from the law and various other forces of bourgeois society, several times over in his long career (notably elsewhere with “Breathless,” and “First Name: Carmen,”) but never with as much joyous, silly verve as in “Pierrot le Fou,” that walks the line between send-up and loving homage to the “Gun Crazy”s of American cinema with humor and insight and, of course, a heavy dash of self-aware intellectual pretension. His experimentalism is here in force—jump cuts, abrupt music cues, entire sequences shot through red or blue filters—but there is enough of a narrative strand, or rather he references genres that we’re already so familiar with, that there’s always a lifeline to cling to, even within the film’s most avant-garde moments. The constant wordplay (“Allons-y, Alonzo!”), pop culture references and jokes also contribute to the breeziness of tone (he nods to everything from “Johnny Guitar” to Elnett hairspray to the “put a Tiger in your tank” advertising campaign for Esso) and the primary-color palette mean the film passes by in a giddy rush. And it’s all anchored by the criminally photogenic Anna Karina sporting a variety of fetishizable outfits and hairstyles, and the King of Cool Jean-Paul Belmondo as the lovers who are not so much star cross’d as filled with odd whimsy and bouts of existential ennui. And yes, that is actually Sam Fuller playing “American Film Director Sam Fuller” at a party early on, at which, hilariously, the women talk about toiletries while the men discuss cars. There are murders and double-crosses and some sort of quasi terrorist/arms dealing group, and lashings of comically morose reflections on life, death and art, but it all practically screams at you not to take it seriously and the result is one of Godard’s simplest, most viscerally enjoyable films, with an ending so funny-silly that it wouldn’t be out of place in an early Woody Allen sketch movie. If you like the lunacy of a line like: “It’s a good thing I don’t like spinach, because if I did I’d have to eat it, and I can’t stand the stuff. It’s the same with you, only backwards,” you’ll love “Pierrot le Fou.” And we do. [B+]
“The 39 Steps” (1935)
While quite a few of Hitchcock’s films feature, in part at least, a pair of lovers on the run (“North by Northwest,” “Spellbound”) perhaps he found the fullest expression of the theme in this absolutely totally genius 1935 film, the first and still the best adaptation of John Buchan’s “The 39 Steps.” Here, however, the lovers on the run are wrongly accused: Richard Hannay (our 1930s boyfriend Robert Donat) has been framed and, desperate to clear his name, ends up involving a bystander, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) as his initially unwilling but gradually thawing companion. In both their innocence and the fact that they don’t actually fall in love until fairly late in the game, this could seem like an atypically naïve inclusion on this list, populated as it is more by amoral psychos whose only world is each other, but that would belie the fantastic chemistry between the two and the charm and humor that Hitch milks from even the most thrillingly perilous of situations. In fact, we’d argue that the scene in which, handcuffed to Richard, Pamela has to remove her wet stockings, has more sheer sex appeal that any amount of soft-focus writhing flesh. That not only do these lovers successfully outrun and outwit the police and the bad guys who are pursuing them, but they also end up basically saving the country with their heroism, is the totally satisfying conclusion to this brilliantly entertaining caper, a film that, for once on this list, doesn’t end in a hail of bullets, but rather with a very sweet close up of holding hands. [A]
“Sun Don’t Shine” (2012)
You probably best know Amy Seimetz as an actress (TV’s “The Killing,” Shane Carruth‘s “Upstream Color“) but she’s a formidable writer/director in her own right, as evidenced by her 2012 debut feature, the mesmerizing “Sun Don’t Shine.” The film stars Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley (who appears briefly as Casey Affleck‘s brother in “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” which is of course, directed by David Lowery, Carruth’s ‘Upstream’ editor, and thus the circle is complete) as a couple on the run from the Very Bad Thing that Crystal (Sheil) has done, which also happens to be riding in the back of their truck. Seimetz creates a world that is sun-bleached, overexposed and dreamy; a perfect rendering of a faded Florida road trip. Sheil and Audley give performances that are pitched at two completely different frequencies—she seems constantly lost in a daydream or a nightmare, never really face-to-face with reality, as he confronts their situation head-on, growing more panicked and frenzied by the minute. Because we are aligned with Crystal for the majority of the movie, we aren’t completely sure just what the situation is, because she isn’t. Seimetz infuses this dreamy yet terrifying crime drama with the look and feel of a beachy road trip vacation, and the result is something completely unique and utterly compelling. [A-]