The Sugarland Express - 1974

 So I was listening to some podcast and someone described this movie as Speilberg's first film, and I was like, fuck it.  In film class I had seen Duel, and Jaws was right after, so here we go.

The Sugarland Express was part of a selection of 4 movies I sold to my girlfriend as "bizarre romance" in a themed week we're having.  They're all offbeat, perhaps not even romance at the core, but that has to be involved and central in the theme.  

The plot of this is based on a true story, a Badlands/Bonnie and Clyde mold of a bad guy bad girl team who go out in a car and cause major havoc running from the law.  This reminded me a lot of Bonnie and Clyde, which I have just watched recently and I loved.  Thematically similar of course, they are both about rebel couples that took to the road and took to violence as their solution to life, and the difficult and heartbreaking end that brought them to.

In The Sugarland Express, Goldie Hawn stars as Lou, and in the beginning she goes to her husband in jail and sets up the film to him:  she is going to possibly lose her son, and so she wants to break her husband Clovis out and get their boy.  They get Clovis out in a simple maneuver and then they're on the road.  When they're pulled over for a simple traffic reason, they freak out and hit the gas and now the entire state is after them as the crimes stack up and the tensions rise, especially after they kidnap young police officer Max.

The great thing about this film, and the enduring reason for Jaws and the enduring reason for Speilberg's majesty with films is the characters.  They're so well written, subtle, and likeable.  The villains, the cops, the oddball status of everyone, the effort here to find something we as an audience can latch onto is tremendous.  When it wants to be scary and tense it is, when it wants to be funny it is, when it wants us to care, we do.  The feeling was the same in Jaws, when we have to spend so long with the characters cause the shark is not around, we have to like these guys.  

The Sugarland Express does not look or feel it's age either.  I'd definitely have guessed 70's because of the cars, but I'd have definitely guessed late 70s or early 80s because of how this feels.

5 stars.