Easy Rider
Amazon.co.uk Review
This box-office hit from 1969 is an important pioneer of the American independent cinema movement, and a generational touchstone to boot. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play hippie motorcyclists crossing the Southwest and encountering a crazy quilt of good and bad people. Jack Nicholson turns up in a significant role as an attorney who joins their quest for awhile and articulates society’s problem with freedom as Fonda’s and Hopper’s characters embody it. Hopper directed, essentially bringing the no-frills filmmaking methods of legendary, drive-in movie producer Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors) to a serious feature for the mainstream. The film can’t help but look a bit dated now (a psychedelic sequence toward the end particularly doesn’t hold up well) but it retains its original power, sense of daring and epochal impact. — Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
A beautiful film, taking us back to the days of peace and love, and motorbikes. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are perfect for their roles, although the bikes are joint stars as well. Jack Nicholson like you’ve never seen him before! Brilliant music throughout including Hendrix, McGuin and Steppenwolf – that famous track Born to be wild. One film that just must be watched over and over again. A true classic for those who remember the era and those who want to find out what it was like.
Rating: 5 / 5
“Some films captivate the zeitgeist of the American imagination so completely that they become instant cult favorites. But few such films prove potent enough to retain the favor of audiences in perpetuity. So the fact that, 35 years after the film’s release, audiences around the world are still captivated by the raw vision of Easy Rider is no small accomplishment. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are the quintessential hippie bikers. Cruising across America with a gas tank full of dope, these two dropouts are living the dream of freedom and rugged individuality. To this day, the image of Fonda and Hopper (neither of whom knew how to ride a motorcycle before making this film) careening helmetless down the open highway to the tune of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” defines the American biker motif more clearly than any Hell’s Angel could ever hope to.” Bart Zeigler
“Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way” Steppenwolf- “Born To be Wild’
37 years after ‘Easy Rider’ was first shown, I viewed the movie again. I was prepared to think I remembered the story, the story of an American myth, with anitheroes riding from the West only this time on bikes into the evil of middle America. I thought the best thing about the film was the soundtrack. It was an important film but not a very good one. Then I watched it, and I was hooked from scene one. The film drew me in, such a very good film. Not perfect but very good. Dennis Hopper’s character,was so real, the dishelveled, long-haired. I remember many people who dressed and acted just like him. He directed the film and gave the character’s names Wyatt and Billy, old west names discovering new territory. The acting was natural, not self-conciuous. It covers alot of territory in 90 plus minutes. The landscapes so beautiful and unspoiled. The surprises were the fact that Phil Spectre was cast as the connection- how trite and real is that? The early scene with the rancher and his family was one of the beautiful scenes of the film. Wyatt tells the rancher: “It’s not everyman who can live off the land, you know, doing his own thing his own time. You should be proud.”
The film comes alive with the character of George, played by Jack Nicholsen as an ACLU lawyer. What a handsome dude, a purveyor of many roles to come. I remembered wondering about his character and thinking his Southern accent was too much and his football helmet silly. Now I understand about the football helmet and George’s speech about how America used to be “a helluva good country”. That night around the campfire, he samples grass for the first time, “Lord have mercy, is that what that is?” But best of all, yes, best of all, is Peter Fonda and the quiet, intelligent, Captain America/Wyatt. He moves through the movie with, as my best friend would say, a noblesse oblige, a retired drug pusher who, minutes into the movie, casts away his past and his allegiance to time with his wristwatch. Captain America and Billy find the whorehouse George directed them to and drop acid in the cemetery with two hookers, Karen Black in a great role. It is a long acid trip that sets the standard for hallucination portrayals for years to come. It’s a bad trip, but maybe they chose the wrong place with the wrong people. And all is not well in the land of the free. A brief run-in with a few local yokels leads to their undoing. I’d thought Easy Rider would seem dated. Turns out it’s timeless.
Easy Rider is a lengthy music video for the ’60s culture. But it is also an honest perspective on the counterculture movement. Fonda and Hopper’s portrayal of that experience is free of the romanticized tone that characterizes so many other films from this era. Fonda’s dialogue the night before his death is a purveyor of things to come. Hopper is happy because they’ve made it to their destination with their drug money. “We blew it,” Fonda tells him. “We blew it, man.” Heavy.
“Easy Rider (1969) is the late 1960s “road film” tale of a search for freedom (or the illusion of freedom) in a conformist and corrupt America, in the midst of paranoia, bigotry and violence. Released in the year of the Woodstock concert, and made in a year of two tragic assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King), the Vietnam War buildup and Nixon’s election, the tone of this ‘alternative’ film is remarkably downbeat and bleak, reflecting the collapse of the idealistic 60s. Easy Rider, one of the first films of its kind, was a ritualistic experience and viewed (often repeatedly) by youthful audiences in the late 1960s as a reflection of their hopes of liberation and fears of the Establishment.”
Roger Ebert
‘Easy Rider’ took to me a place and time I knew intimately, and I was trasported back to those not so innocent happy times. ‘What a long strange trip it’s been’.
‘Truckin’ Grateful Dead
“Sometimes the light’s all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been ”
Highly, Heartily, Recommended. prisrob 07-05-07
Easy Rider – Deluxe Edition CD
Rating: 5 / 5
Most of the negative reviews here criticise this movie as being dated and for idolising the waster culture – possibly related criticisms – but it’s difficult to see how you could justify either except on a very cursory consideration of the film.
Easy Rider absolutely refuses to idolise the sixties ideal, and it is not to my eyes even vaguely dated (I say this having seen it for the first time last night, thirty three years late).
The golden thread running through this film is that THE PARTY’S OVER, DUDES.
Fonda states this explicitly (“we blew it…”) and it’s firmly implied in a devastatingly funny caricature of a dead beat hippy commune (as the city dropouts joyously commune with nature, scattering their seed on the barren land of the New Mexico desert, Fonda asks wryly, “do you, ah, get much rain up here?”)
And (without wishing to spoil the ending) by the time the credits roll, our heroes haven’t exactly profited from their wild lives. The ending of the film is profoundly pessimistic about the prospects for freedom and independence.
The film is certainly critical of the intolerant “establishment” (which nevertheless prevails), but if there is one character who does smell of roses, it is the farmer who takes the boys in for the night and who, says Fonda, should be proud simply for living off the land.
For my money this makes Easy Rider ahead, rather than behind its times. It’s also rooted in a number of great cinematic traditions, aside from the Road Movie genre which it helped to invent. I like the idea (expressed in a review below) that this is a latter day western, even down to the character’s names, Wyatt and Billy. Also, were you to draw a line between Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and Thelma & Louise, it would intersect Easy Rider.
The performances of the cast are delightful – Nicholson’s is rightly feted, and Hopper’s is very Dennis Hopper – fans of Apocalypse Now will recognise this style in which Hopper doesn’t really act so much as simply looning around – here in total contrast to Fonda’s studied coolness, which holds the film together, reinforced with a cracking soundtrack (in this regard also, Easy Rider was well ahead of its time).
If you fancy a dash of counterpoint, try watching Easy Rider back to back with David Lynch’s stunning recent work The Straight Story – as a compare and contrast job, I think they’d make a fascinating study.
Rating: 5 / 5
You are paying extra for the Blu Ray for a very slight increase in picture quality over the DVD and lossless sound (but no DTS).
The documentary and Dennis Hopper audio commentary were ported over from the DVD.
Not really enough IMHO.
Rating: 3 / 5
Sounds quality is pretty good. Picture quality is much less than you’d expect for a BluRay. It is better than DVD, but if you’ve been spoilt by hidef transfers like Zulu then your in for disappointment. The film itself is a classic, and worthy of a place in anyones film collection. I doubt a film like this could ever be made again. It provides a great feeling of the time & culture in which it was made. Music score is brilliant.
Rating: 4 / 5