Easy Rider ***** (1969, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Toni Basil, Phil Spector, Luke Askew, Luana Anders, Robert Walker Jr) – Classic Movie Review 1738

The 33-year-old director Dennis Hopper’s exhilarating, liberating 1969 landmark counter-culture classic Easy Rider stars himself with Peter Fonda (29) as Billy and Wyatt (nicknamed Captain America). They are a pair of bikers who ride off from Los Angeles to Mardis Gras in New Orleans to look for America, and instead find drunken lawyer Jack Nicholson), hitchhikers, a jail cell, a brothel, prostitutes (Karen Black and Toni Basil) and the death of a friend.

Nicholson steals the movie in a thrilling performance as George Hanson, the small-town lawyer they pick up half way along their trip. He’s a spoiled Southerner who, in chucking off the shackles of a middle-class job he hates, provides a charismatic, but rather iffy anti-hero role model for kids looking for inspiration to live a life of responsibility-free freedom in the love and peace hippie era.

The film captures the zeitgeist of a significant moment of enormous cultural change and was a huge blockbuster box office smash thanks to its mesmerising entertainment value and its apparent significance to a whole generation, dealing with issues of the day in a way that captured the imagination of late-60s youth. It makes an irresistible appeal to an idea of liberation without actually having to do anything much about it, except get on your bike and go travelling or chuck your job and hit the booze and drugs. Talking of which, real drugs were used in the scenes showing the use of marijuana and other substances.

Easy Rider is far more professionally crafted by director Hopper and producer Fonda than other biker movies of the period, and has an engrossing screenplay, with riveting dialogue, written by Hopper and Fonda along with Terry Southern. The issue-led as well as character-driven script sets out to explores the contemporary tensions in the United States, looking at the rise and fall of the hippie movement, drug use and the communal lifestyle. 

The movie’s tremendous Sixties rock soundtrack from the likes of The Band, The Byrds, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Steppenwolf is another huge asset, with Born to Be Wild, The Weight, I Wasn’t Born to Follow, If Six Was Nine, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding and so on. Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn composes and performs the Ballad of Easy Rider, after Bob Dylan wrote out the first verse and told the film-makers to give it to him.

This key late Sixties New Wave film shook old Hollywood to the core and it soon succumbed to the revolution. Easy Rider brought on the end of the era of the American film studios, who didn’t know how to respond to the brave new world, and was responsible for initially spurring a wave of mostly much less successful counter-culture movies by the studios. But the success of Easy Rider (along with Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate) then also sparked the New Hollywood phase of film-making by new young independently minded film-makers during the early 1970s.

However, Fonda and Hopper didn’t go on to the even greater things expected of them, though they kept working profitably. But Nicholson, who only landed his role when Rip Torn dropped out, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and the film established him as a star, way outpacing Hopper and Fonda. The film was also nominated for Best Original Story and Screenplay. Unsurprisingly, there were no wins, but Hopper received the First Film Award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Karen Black, Luana Anders, Robert Walker Jr, Luke Askew and Phil Spector co-star, along with Antonio Mendoza, Mac Mashourian, Warren Finnerty, Tita Colorado, Sabrina Scharf, Sandy Wyeth, Robert Ball and Toni Basil.

On a $360,000 cost, it earned $60 million worldwide, with most of its business in America (where it grossed $41.7 million), becoming the third highest grossing film of 1969.

Hopper and Fonda first worked together as actors on The Trip (1967), written by Nicholson, with similar themes and characters to Easy Rider. The Trip get-together led to Easy Rider. Though the son of a famous and conservative-minded old Hollywood star, Fonda became a counter-culture icon in The Wild Angels (1966), in which he played biker Heavenly Blue, forming a template for his persona in The Trip and Easy Rider.

The iconic tricked-out, Captain America Harley-Davidson driven by Peter Fonda is headed to the auction block on October 18 2014, and it is expected to bring over $1 million. The record for a movie or TV motor vehicle is $4.6 million, netted by the original TV Batmobile at auction in 2013.

It was Hopper’s first of seven films as director. He died of cancer on May 29 2010, aged 74.

Peter Fonda (1940–2019).

RIP  two-time Oscar nominee Peter Fonda: ‘A sweet and gracious man’. He died of lung cancer on August 16, 2019, aged 79. He was Oscar nominated as Best Actor for Ulee’s Gold (1997) and for Best Original Story and Screenplay for Easy Rider (Shared with Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern).

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1738

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