Easy Rider started as a project by two Hollywood insiders trying to find the next rung on a career ladder. Promising actor Dennis Hopper was reduced to doing an occasional bad-guy appearance in big pictures (True Grit) while struggling in the AIP trenches with Peter Fonda, a pretty boy with no discernable acting ability but blessed with a fine Hollywood name. Along with their co-star Jack Nicholson, they'd been scraping along, name talent lacking a career springboard.

Easy Rider has good writing and a little style but mostly was the right movie in the right place at the right time. The style can be attributed to the camera of László Kovács and the writing to willing scribe Terry Southern, a man-on-fire liberal looking for an opportunity to work without studio interference. On that score Columbia ended up being much more reasonable than American-International; the house of Arkoff was not seeing big profits with sex and drugs, and interfered with Roger Corman's movies so much that he just quit directing a couple of years later. Easy Rider went out with all of its drug use and nudity intact.

Terry Southern reportedly ceded sole script authorship to Fonda and Hopper (no humble souls, they) and his dialogue is only as good as who is saying it. Jack Nicholson bursts forth as a great interpreter of Cassavetes-like character material, completely overturning his earlier ten years as one of the youth movement's least-promising talents; time and again he came off as stiff, forced and silly. He nails his character, the film's sole 'normal' hero who earns the respect of his too-hip road buddies.

Dennis Hopper delivers his fast-talking BS brand of patter and is just fine, even though his character isn't as a coherent as Nicholson's. Wyatt and Billy are unknowing prophets, man, voyagers on the highway of life .... they don't explain themselves, man, it's, like your job to get into their heads.

Although Peter Fonda strikes the perfect pose as Wyatt aka Captain America in a leather outfit with the American flag on his back, he has the same empty, clueless face that's dogged him throughout his career, and can't handle dialogue to save his soul. Every word he speaks comes out like a lead ingot, especially the 'far out' phrases. He does look convincingly stoned now and then. Doubtless many a critic more savvy than I can reach into Easy Rider and come out with an analysis that elevates the movie to the status of The Odyssey. When looked at objectively, it's a road film with three or four okay dialogue scenes, some bad escapades in a commune (although the wonderful Luana Anders is there, neglected as usual) and several very credible run-ins with Southern rednecks. Toni Basil and Karen Black enliven the New Orleans scenes but the LSD party in the graveyard is no great showcase for acting. I'm told many viewers think it's the best presentation of an acid trip on film, however.

There's nothing particularly cinematic happening here. I'm not moved by Hopper's visuals in the graveyard acid trip or his comical stagger-cut scene transitions (do I detect the influence of The Monkees here? There is one near-miraculous shot of Fonda's chopper disintegrating as it flies by the camera at high speed, and a few serendipitous visuals on the road, but that's it. What the movie neatly avoids is the usual "it's happening" baloney found in the AIP losers like Psych-Out and parts of the not-bad The Trip. It drops any notion of explaining itself through exposition or other audience-friendly techniques. It doesn't provide a road map for its own content, or a viewer surrogate character to interpret events for us.

I was only 17 when an older cousin, a real biker type, took me to Easy Rider. I had the typical teen reaction of the time - I liked it but couldn't say why. My cousin wasn't very hippie-friendly and had no use for it at all. I still like the film, in a way, but there's definitely something missing in this 'too hip' road trip by a pair of egotistical Hollywood boys. Wyatt's final utterance, "We blew it man, we blew it" is as fake as phony 'right on' movie dialogue gets.

So Easy Rider is much more significant than it is 'good.' There was The Graduate a couple of years before, but this is the movie that made Nixon's Silent Majority decide that there was a thing called The Generation Gap.

The enhanced transfer looks fine and the audio has been remixed in 5.1 for those of you with a yen for the mellow lyrics of Bob Dylan sung by Roger McGuire, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Easy Rider rates:
Movie: Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Commentary by Dennis Hopper, docu Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage, production notes, soundtrack CD, BFI book Easy Rider by Lee Hill
Packaging: Double disc (1 DVD , 1 CD in slim Keep case with book in card sleeve.
Reviewed: October 21, 2004