I would argue that there is a Spielbergian moment that punctuates the memories of almost anyone that has been exposed to the movies. This is precisely Steven Spielberg’s power as a filmmaker—he creates worlds and characters that become enfolded into your consciousness, your identity, and your soul, whether you like it or not. Some people swear they hate him, but their passionate vitriol barely conceals the zeal so evident in their diatribes. Others love him like a messiah. I fall somewhere in the middle. He is undeniably one of the most tactile and effortless filmmakers that ever lived. He is also a pop-slut whose potential and all-too-briefly realized gifts for dramatizing humanity within generic parameters have gradually been subsumed by his business acumen and surfeit political correctness. His innate skills as a filmmaker (all on display from the get-go) grew only with technology and budgets, but his viewpoint remained stubbornly, cloyingly anchored to whatever was the zeitgeist of the safe American Dream.

But let us turn back the clock and visit the Spielberg of my youth. As a kid at my aunt and uncle’s bayside New Jersey condo, blanketed from air conditioning and waiting to check my crab traps, I would repeatedly watch and be scared shitless by his first, mighty blockbuster film, Jaws. And then certain memories of my father are intertwined with Spielberg’s mind-blowingly ambitious, hugely entertaining, and, I think, annoyingly underrated epic, 1941, which we watched together on UHF channel 17 in Philadelphia. This was just about when my father was the undefeated hero of my childhood, harmless toy gunplay was a regular, green knee-stained summer custom, and Steven Spielberg was the filmmaker that spoke to me the most.

This is also the time of The Sugarland Express, pre-Jaws and post-Duel, and the work of a stirringly great 28-year-old filmmaker. But we also have here cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond at his grittiest and most unobtrusively mobile; editor Verna Fields fresh off an incredible collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich; Goldie Hawn at her feistiest and (affecting an indelible drawl) most genuine; Ben Johnson, as commanding and righteous as ever, portraying the morally divided Captain Tanner (despite Bogdanovich’s having practically eulogized him three years earlier in The Last Picture Show); and William Atherton, who as the sacrificial lamb husband is, for the first and last time, actually likable.

According to the opening legend, Sugarland Express is based on true events that took place in rural Texas in 1969. Immediately Spielberg establishes his abundant gifts as we open on a highway sign and then pull back to reveal a blasted Texan landscape with a decrepit car in the foreground and an approaching bus on the horizon (right out of North by Northwest). From the bus emerges our heroine Lou Jean Poplin, the first incarnation of the blonde, frumpily dressed, independent, and longingly romantic woman we shall see again in his subsequent films, from Lorraine Gary (Jaws) to Teri Garr and Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters) to Dee Wallace (E.T.). Goldie was his first and remains his best because she is not protecting her child from aliens or sharks, but from a bureaucratic system that threatens to destroy her family. She fights with ruthless immaturity and flamboyant innocence but always with a single-minded love. The narrative takes place over the course of roughly 30 hours and is imbued with a characteristically even blend of beauty, sentiment, and populism as well as (uncharacteristic for Spielberg) an inexorable sense of hopelessness, an almost Kafkaesque regard for inculpable transgressions and the intolerant retribution that lies waiting, just over the horizon.

Lou Jean’s plan is a simple and simple-minded one: she intends to break her husband, Clovis, out of jail to rescue their son, Baby Langston, from the clutches of the foster parents the state has given him. It’s a stupid and desperate gamble and Clovis knows it (he has only four more months of his sentence left), but Lou Jean, turning him on sexually and then threatening to leave him if he says no, demonstrates amazing (and totally believable) powers of manipulation. Soon enough they are riding away in the back seat of a car stolen from an older couple that had come to visit their own son. (All this takes place during the first five minutes of the film, a testimony to Spielberg’s faculty for visual plot development.)

Soon a young Texas Highway Patrolman, Maxwell Slide, pulls over the old couple’s overheating car for going too slow and Lou Jean and Clovis act too quickly and defensively (Lou Jean: “Baby, you ready to go to the end?! Do you love me?”) and in the blink of an eye we are swept into a car chase of astounding technical dexterity which effortlessly and credibly ends with Slide taken hostage and the Poplins being pursued by the wise and weather-beaten Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), who has an almighty capability for keeping the peace; he hasn’t had a death in a hostage situation for 18 years.

This may be Spielberg’s most purely human-interest story. Less concerned with history or science fiction, the Spielberg at work on Sugarland Express is most interested in sympathizing with the outlaws and, if not justifying, then exploring the all-too-human reasons for their “unconstitutional” behavior. The fans that line the highways holding up signs like “OUR NAME IS POPLIN TOO!” or hand over wallets and food and teddy bears and say things like “It’s your baby, don’t let anyone take it away,” are not crazed radicals but simple rural folks that need heroes, regular people, just like them, to reflect their values and dreams as they ride the wave of unintentional celebrity. This is only at the film’s halfway point, and already we see all the chaos, unrest, class distinction, and paternal responsibility that bubbles beneath the primary action. One wonders if nowadays Mr. Spielberg would root for these gun-toting outlaws out to reclaim their child. This is, after all, the man who shamelessly replaced guns with flashlights in the re-release of E.T.

At one point Spielberg had shown a keen ability for including amusing peripheral characters just for fun (this gift seems to have become increasingly flabby along Spielberg’s career path): the drunk who after the first car chase can’t light a cigarette either from nerves or the DTs, the old couple stranded in the middle of nowhere bickering about who’s at fault, the son of one of the vigilantes, coke-bottle glasses perched on his nose above his chin which rests on a wooden fence rail framed with his fingers, enthralled, watching the action. Beyond this film, Spielberg’s conservative sense of justice has always bothered me. But in Sugarland, the slapstick of it all, borne out of a love to entertain, adds up to more than the sum its parts.

There is a scene where Clovis and Lou Jean, who have eluded the police and are hiding out in a showcase mobile home, have their second (or perhaps first?) honeymoon. They cuddle and kiss with a chemistry and tenderness bordering on fantasy. Post-coitally, they lie in bed and watch the drive-in screen across the street with Clovis providing the sound effects for what’s playing—a Road Runner cartoon. As Clovis makes whistling and beeping noises and as Lou Jean giggles from the bed, Clovis’s expression becomes more serious and insular. In the window’s reflection we see Wile E. Coyote meeting his inevitable doom, and it strikes a chord within Clovis, a somewhat vague hint at the future. He is slowly becoming a realist, aware that the inevitable is near, that their honeymoon could end at any moment, that this is the calm before the storm. Clovis is on the verge of losing his innocence.

This scene is so good on so many levels, but is most interesting to view with the contemporary Steven Spielberg in mind. It is a turning point for Clovis, but also, I think, for the director. It feels like Spielberg, playing the dual role of both audience and author to the inevitable bloodletting that awaits our hero at the end, is as unsettled as Clovis and that he too, doesn’t like what he sees. One’s heart trusts that even though this episode ends badly (Wile E. Coyote plummets to his death from some high cliff in the painted desert), he will once again rise to give chase. Clovis and Spielberg share this childlike optimism; the cartoon’s artifice draws out the adult in them. They are both committed to this mess of a situation, so as a function of the system in which they are already so deeply entrenched, they must take responsibility for the decisions that brought them there. Clovis dies, however, and Spielberg would live again. And next up: Jaws, the original blockbuster and the shot at redemption that Clovis, his forgotten hero, never had a chance to attain.

Despite everyone’s warnings, Clovis obeys his wife and tries to enter the house where his baby is supposedly being held (we know it is not). The plan is to go to Mexico, of course, as a family, to live happily ever after. When Clovis is shot we do not blame Lou Jean, as Hitchcock probably would have. Spielberg does not impart the sense of danger and deception with which Hitch had regarded his blonde heroines. Spielberg lets her off the hook as merely naive, too idealistic, too impulsive to have any concrete idea about how much trouble they were really in until it was too late. Whereas Hitchcock might have intimated that she manipulated Clovis, consciously or subconsciously, Spielberg keeps it simple: she really believes that her child is in the house. Clovis is shot and a quick series of disjointed images manages to convey a swift getaway. The dying Clovis is back in the car and driving recklessly on towards Mexico while Lou Jean has what seems to be a mostly improvised hissy-fit in the back seat—shredding gifts and tossing money and Gold Stamps out the window, thrashing at the seats. It’s more than a little over-the-top and you get the feeling that Spielberg’s only direction was to tell her to go bananas. It’s almost as if, disheartened by his own ending, Spielberg abandons her to misery and pain because, after all, it is technically her fault. When Clovis finally expires, the car putters out onto an island in the middle of the Rio Grande—a hallowed place for American movies, a place where mythological outlaws rise above their surroundings. This scene, though, is filmed from a high angle. Our hero is dead and our heroine is comatose with grief. If Peckinpah had been behind the camera, this would be a moment to pay respects to our tragic heroes, to find the nobility in their futile endeavor. But Spielberg seems merely disappointed in them, upset that they didn’t get away.

We then cut to Slide and Tanner silhouetted before the shimmering, golden Rio Grande. Tanner gives him his gun back and Slide says, “He’d never have used it.” Tanner knows this, but also knows better than to reply. He has kept the peace, tragic as it may have been. The image is beautiful, but the moment is deflating. These men have been broken by the system they believed in and will never be the same again. Depressing? Not completely—an epilogue legend tells us that Lou Jean was eventually reunited with Baby Langston. Truthful? More so than anything Spielberg has ever made. Unfortunately for our heroes, there are no flying saucers waiting to take them away to a distant planet, far from their messy earthbound lives. This is reality, kid, if you want a happy ending go somewhere else. Wait another year and that somewhere else will be a quaint little island called Amity, and Spielberg will be at the helm of a much bigger boat. ++