Easy Rider . Top Story - September 2024.
Two bikers transport cocaine across the American Southwest while being violently verbally and physically assaulted by small-town squares and murderous hill jacks in this quintessential "cultural touchstone" for the Hippie Generation. Directed by Dennis Hopper, it stars Hopper, Peter Fonda, and a young and handsome Jack Nicholson. Hopper plays "Billy"; Fonda is "Wyatt" or "Captain America" (he has a jacket with an American flag patch on the back that, during that era, would have been considered offensive). Nicholson is a drunken ACLU lawyer in a small-town jail. As they roar down the hot highway, headed toward New Orleans and the promise of a paradisiacal bacchanal called "Mardi Gras," we get an expansive view of the environment through which they drive their souped-up hogs. It's an amazing American landscape, as perfect as a Western landscape portrait, wherein scrubby arroyo is the unsmiling subject, its flat and desolate face punctured by huge grasping fingers of sacred stone thrusting upward to the blue murder sky. (Quoth Harrelson in Natural Born Killers, "Well, now that is poetry.")
