Steven Spielberg (41 page)

“We did things on
Sugarland
that had never been done before,” marvels Gilmore. “We shot a 360-degree pan inside a car with dialogue. That had never been done before. It was the first film that had a dolly shot
inside
a car, [moving] from the front to the back seat. We did a dolly shot into the back seat at thirty-five miles per hour! We were awed by Steven's knowledge and his basic instincts when it came to doing things with a camera.”

“I don't know where Steven got the ideas he tried to do, because I had never seen shots like that,” Zsigmond says. “Steven realizes the moving camera is essential for movies. I feel the same way. That's what gives you the third dimension, which is the way movies should be. If you lock down the camera, it's like seeing everything with one eye. It's like shooting in a theater. Movies should be untheatrical. The first time when the camera approaches the police car, we found two roads that converged. With me in the camera car paralleling, getting closer and closer, we go into a close shot. It was a very difficult shot to do, and it was fun to do.”

Spielberg and Zsigmond shared a dislike for the crudely obvious use of the zoom lens that was then in fashion, so they frequently employed the Altmanesque device of zooming and panning simultaneously, a fluid technique that disguises the fact that the camera is zooming, yet allows the camera to change perspectives rapidly and with a more subtly disorienting effect on the audience. Spielberg also made striking use of a combined zoom and dolly movement near the end of the film, when the car with the principal characters slowly approaches the house of the baby's foster parents. The camera dollies forward, toward the window and over the shoulder of a sharpshooter, while simultaneously zooming back from the car coming from the distance, framed by the window curtains. This was the technique Hitchcock had used to create James Stewart's subjective “vertigo effect” in
Vertigo,
and which Spielberg later would use to create a celebrated moment of terror in
Jaws.

At that critical moment before the climax of
Sugarland,
Spielberg's use of that camera technique “suspended animation for fifteen seconds,” Gilmore notes. “As Steven moved in, he zoomed out, so the foreground and background were juxtaposed, with the people in the car and the sharpshooter all in the same relation to each other. With two tools fighting against each other, he literally froze time. To this day, I am absolutely in awe of that shot.”

Spielberg already seemed to have “the experience of a man forty years old,” Zsigmond said in a location interview with
American
Cinematographer.
“The way he directs a film makes you think that he must have many features behind him…. I can only compare him to Orson Welles, who was a very talented director when he was very young…. Most young directors, when they get their first film, somehow get timid; they pull back; they try to play it safe, because they are afraid that they will never get another chance to make a feature. Not Steve. He really gets right into the middle. He really tries to do the craziest things. Most of the shots he gets he could only dream about doing, up until now.”

P
ERHAPS
the most impressive achievement of Spielberg's direction is that it never lets the spectacle of the chase overwhelm the personal drama inside the car involving Lou Jean, Clovis, and Officer Slide. It was the depth of his feelings about the characters, particularly about Lou Jean, that kept Spielberg plugging away for four years to make something “a little more personal” than the other, less commercially risky projects he was being offered at that formative stage of his professional career.

“A lot of Steven was in that movie, more than in some of his other movies,” Zsigmond believes. “He didn't think about commercializing
The
Sugarland
Express.
He just wanted to make a good movie with good characters. I think Steven has never been better.”

Although the fugitive's wife was only mentioned in passing in the newspaper article that triggered Spielberg's interest in the Dent affair, she became his central dramatic focus in the film, emerging as a largely unsympathetic character, a symbol of mother love gone berserk. The film reveals, if not a streak of latent misogyny, a fear of women in the youthful Spielberg, and a deep ambivalence about mothers. It also introduces a recurring theme of Spielberg's films, that of the irresponsible parent. Lou Jean and Clovis, petty criminals both, behave so desperately to get Baby Langston back because they know they have failed so miserably in their parental obligations.

The DPS officer leading the pursuit, Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), recognizes that Lou Jean and Clovis are not hardened criminals but “just kids.” Tanner is more mature and a benevolent father figure, but he too is a failure, abandoning his principled attempt to avoid violence. Most painfully, after giving his personal word of honor to trade Baby Langston for Officer Slide, Tanner has to go back on his word to bring the chase to an end. A familiar face from John Ford Westerns, the weatherbeaten Johnson embodies the rectitude of a nineteenth-century lawman, but in the debased environment of this contemporary Western-on-wheels, he also represents the obsolescence of the cowboy code of honor.

In a 1993 essay on Spielberg's films, “A Father Runs from It,” Henry Sheehan observed that “at the bottom of many of the movies lies a dark and forbidding desire to be rid once and for all of one's responsibilities, one's family, one's children. It is that keenly felt urge, usually buried deep within the movies, that gives Spielberg's films their anxious drive and the climaxes their sense of overwhelming relief.” Lou Jean's compulsive need to reunite her family at all costs expresses the childlike pain Spielberg continued to feel over his own family breakup, for which, at the time it occurred, he primarily blamed his mother. In his depiction of Lou Jean as a child-woman can perhaps be seen his boyhood recognition that his own mother was “just like a little girl who never grew out of her pinafore.” His depiction of the disastrous results of Lou Jean's impulsive, deluded behavior reflects a level of mature understanding in the twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker—his recognition
of the impossibility of putting the pieces of a shattered family back together. Spielberg's examination of irresponsible parent figures and broken families, from
The
Sugarland
Express
to
Schindler's
List,
has led him to film terrifying images of the primal trauma of children being separated from their parents, and to explore the unbearable grief on both sides. The irrational behavior, even madness, that can result from such trauma is the profoundly unsettling emotional core of
The
Sugarland
Express.

“Every film I find out a little more about myself,” Spielberg said after completing
Sugarland.
“I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces. A personal movie for me is one about people with obsessions.”

For a director who so often has been accused of sentimentality, Spielberg started his feature career with a remarkably unsentimental character study, as well as an unsparing mockery of what Vincent Canby in his
New
York
Times
review called “the American public's insatiable appetite for sentimental nonsense.” Lou Jean and Clovis are lionized as folk heroes by people in towns they pass along the way, who line the roads, waving at them and shoving presents into the car, mistaking these two dimwits for genuine symbols of rebellion against an authoritarian state.
¶¶
In satirizing the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the Texas chase, partially whipped up by media sensationalists, Spielberg said he was inspired by Billy Wilder's vitriolic 1951 film
Ace
in
the
Hole,
about an unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who keeps a man trapped in a cave to turn his plight into a media event.

To screenwriter Hal Barwood,
The
Sugarland
Express
is about “how Americans find it very easy to confuse notoriety with fame.” Such a confused sense of values was a symptom of the major social issues of the time—the social disintegration caused by the war in Vietnam, the loss of respect for authority, the breakdown of the family, and the widespread recourse to violence—and while
Sugarland
does not address the root causes directly, it is a vivid metaphor for the chaos resulting from those problems. But
Sug
arlanď
s
critique of American society is not easily classifiable politically. Spielberg's relatively isolated personal and artistic development tended to keep him out of step with his generation's rebelliousness, and led him to make a withering critique of the romantic, anarchic excesses of the road movie. His film, in which the young couple on the run is less sympathetic than the lawman directing the chase, would not appeal to left-leaning viewers expecting to have their antiauthoritarianism pandered to and their own social prejudices unexamined. Yet it also would alienate right-leaning viewers with its equally scathing critique of the other trigger-happy lawmen and their gun-crazed vigilante followers.

Although he had been uncomfortable with European critics' attempts to read social meanings into the more clearly allegorical
Duel,
Spielberg strove
more consciously for social meaning with
The
Sugarland
Express.
Generally allowing his themes to emerge organically from the action rather than from verbal rhetoric, Spielberg was less successful when he tried to explain his intentions to the press: “I wanted to make
Sugarland
because it made an important statement about the Great American Dream Machine…. And it was meant to say something about the human condition which, obviously, isn't terribly optimistic.”

Because the theme was so downbeat, Matthew Robbins said that he and Barwood consciously strove for “distancing” effects in their screenplay. They employed a “kaleidoscopic” viewpoint so the audience would not experience Clovis's death as a “shattering event…. There were still other figures who were sympathetic in the movie to cling to.”

Spielberg's compassionate direction of the actors tended to downplay the comic aspects of the script and heighten the dramatic aspects; contrary to what the writers intended, Clovis's death is indeed a “shattering event” for the audience. Spielberg also carried the script's “kaleidoscopic” approach even farther, not so much for distancing purposes but to heighten the complexity of the film's perspective, through his daring multiplicity of visual points of view and the resulting audience empathy with various secondary characters, including Officer Slide and Captain Tanner, compensating for the audience's distancing from the central character, Lou Jean. The emotional residue from his parents' divorce may have prevented Spielberg from viewing Lou Jean's motherly impulses as anything but destructive, and led him to look more kindly on the well-intentioned but essentially impotent males she has under her control.

Viewers accustomed to films that ask them to identify with a single character—in Hollywood parlance, to “root” for a hero or heroine—inevitably were confused and upset by the complexity of tone in
The
Sugarland
Ex
press.
Spielberg himself seemed to have second thoughts about his approach after the film's commercial failure, sketching out in 1977 how “if I had it to do all over again I'd make
Sugarland
Express
in a completely different fashion.” He said he wished he had done the first half of the film entirely from the viewpoint of Captain Tanner, “from behind the police barricades, from inside his patrol cruiser. I would never see the fugitive kids, only hear their voices over the police radio, maybe see three heads in the distance through binoculars. Because I don't think the authorities got a fair shake in
Sug
arland
…. Then [in] the second half of the movie I would have told the entire story inside the car and how really naive and backwoodsy these people are and how frivolous and really stupid their goals were.”

That simplistic remake might have been more successful at the box office, but it is not the film Spielberg actually made. The director's multifaceted point of view makes it possible to experience an unusually wide and subtly inflected range of human emotion.

S
PLELBERG
finished shooting in late March 1973, five days over his fifty-five-day schedule; production manager Bill Gilmore says the delays were all attributable to the weather and the shortness of the winter days, which caused them to lose the light early. After editing the film that summer with Edward Abroms and Verna Fields, Spielberg completed postproduction on September 10.
Sugarland
's
musical score was the first composed for Spielberg by John Williams, who became a regular member of the director's creative team. Spielberg had greatly admired Williams's “wonderful Americana scores” for two Mark Rydell films,
The
Reivers
and
The
Cowboys:
“When I heard both scores I had to meet this modern relic from a lost era of film symphonies…. I wanted a real Aaron Copland sound for my first movie. I wanted eighty instruments, a colossal string section. But John politely said no, this was for the harmonica—and a very small string ensemble.”

In the fall of 1973, the film was ready for its first public preview. “The studio was very pleased with
The
Sugarland
Express
,” veteran Universal publicist Orin Borsten recalls. “He wasn't sharpening his talent on it—he was a
full-blown
talent.” “You cannot believe the excitement [there was] within our ranks over
Sugarland
,” says production executive Bill Gilmore. “It was so innovative for its time, so exciting, we thought it was going to win the Academy Award for best
everything
.”