The Man Behind the Wheel

By Christina Newland

Features—

Sep 25, 2023

The Man Behind the Wheel
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There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be summarized as belonging to the “a man and his car” genre, and the men in question leaned heavily into a particular type. Behind the wheel were the likes of Clint Eastwood, evoking the same steely dominance over his vehicle as he would with a horse, or Steve McQueen, his brooding, hardened squint familiar through the windshield. A viewer might see his sleek turquoise-and-orange Porsche zooming through the twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans, pure mechanical fury and power, or the tautly edited high-speed police chase of William Friedkin’s The French Connection. They might see Vanishing Point’s white Dodge Challenger speeding suicidally toward a police barricade, or the white-knuckle terror faced by Dennis Weaver as he evades a monstrous truck driver on the highway in Duel. In a cascading series of images of torque and squealing tires, Hemi engines and getaway drivers, the seventies’ unmistakable brand of masculinity—so assertive it must be compensating for something—seems to lay itself bare.

The national fascination with forward momentum, individual mobility, and technological prowess had coalesced a few decades prior, after the end of World War II. Pax Americana was a time of wide-open highways, of the pristine waxed surfaces and wide fins of Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles, of drive-in movies and social mobility. 1955 was described by Life magazine as “the most frantic year of car buying America had yet experienced,” and the following year, Eisenhower established the interstate system, kicking off the construction of superhighways across the nation. The car evoked prosperity, but also the promise of relatively affordable freedom: a set of wheels allowed any teenager their own personal vessel.

That freedom also unmistakably gave rise to social fears around juvenile delinquency, reflected in the modified hot rods that bled into the period’s B-movie fare—sensationalist drive-in material like Hot Rod (1950) and Dragstrip Girl (1957)—and eventually into the mainstream in everything from Looney Tunes (Bugs goes for a spin in 1959 short Hot-Rod and Reel!) to James Dean films. Cars were potential death traps on the outside, and, on the inside, readymade backseat bedrooms. The drive-in exploitation movies of the fifties and sixties would do little to dissuade the American mind from linking the fast car and badly behaved youth. The precursors for the violence and nihilism of the seventies car movie are clear in retrospect: take the innovative unbroken shot from the backseat of a getaway car in Gun Crazy (1950); or the chickie-running teen rebels toppling off a cliff in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

If the Nixon era picked up from the youthful feel of car movies past, often updating them for the rebellious spirit of the counterculture, some of its racers had begun to feel their age. “I’m driving again to see if my nerves and my brain are still connected,” says George C. Scott as an aging wheelman in The Last Run, Richard Fleischer’s elegiac crime story from 1971. The film opens with Scott surgically and lovingly working under the hood of his sheeted-up old BMW: a perfect metaphorical image for the connection between the car and the American man of this decade. They’d traveled a long road together by this point.

Top of page: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; above: The Last Run

The automobile industry would face multiple crises in the early seventies, bringing the golden age of the American car to a close. Foreign competition, environmental concerns and regulation, and the OPEC oil crisis in 1973—resulting in fuel shortages and snaking lines at gas stations—all soon put a dampener on car culture, even as it was at its most lionized on-screen. Detroit, a jewel in the crown of national pride, was poised for a fall. The masculine ideals of self-sufficiency that the American motor vehicle represented weren’t just a consumer fantasy; on the production side, they rested on the steady employment generated by the auto industry. As deindustrialization chipped away at the male self-image of a productive breadwinner, on-screen engines continued to rev even louder.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see that the roaring V8 engines of the era’s muscle car, created by the Detroit motor companies in the late sixties, were intended to evoke masculinity. Even the names stress the male-coded virtues of forward drive, momentum, and power: the Mustang, the Challenger, the Charger. These would become the dominant and self-evidently virile cars of choice for the screen heroes (and antiheroes) of the era. There’s the beautiful Ford Mustang of Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), Burt Reynolds’s turbocharged Ford LTD in White Lightning (1973), Warren Oates’s pristine Pontiac GTO in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).

If the muscle car was described by advertisers and motoring journalists as “hairy-chested” and “for the man who wouldn’t mind riding a tiger,” then the barrel-shouldered Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen, with his sunburnt glare, were the perfect protagonists for films where muscle cars were the real stars. McQueen raced cars in his spare time, and once quipped with characteristic humbleness, “I’m not sure whether I’m an actor who races or a racer who acts.” In Le Mans (1971), the camera practically caresses the sleek lines of McQueen’s Porsche. There is no dialogue in the first forty minutes or so of the film, aside from the voice of an announcer explaining the rules of the titular twenty-four-hour endurance race. Shot partially at the contest’s 1970 edition, it is what McQueen hoped would be “the ultimate racing movie,” with a painstaking attention to vehicular detail that almost makes it visually abstract, far more interested in machines than in the people driving them.

Le Mans

The car fetishism on display in films like Le Mans goes some way toward proving William Faulkner right when he wrote, decades prior, that “the automobile has become our national sex symbol.” In The Last American Hero (1973), NASCAR star Roy Jackson (a baby-faced Jeff Bridges) is naked in bed with his race-groupie girlfriend when she asks him if there’s anything he cares about more than cars. “Besides this?” he grins. “Including this,” she says. David Cronenberg would take this sexual-technological tension to its furthest possible extreme in his 1996 adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, first published in 1973.

In this period of anxiety, machismo, and increased horsepower, the car film served to explore and embody the contradictions of changing masculinity. The women’s movement, shifting social mores, and overall confidence in the American project at home and abroad left many men unsure where they stood. If the powerful symbolism of the muscle car could serve as a buffer and outlet for their fantasies, it might shore up their sexual and physical strength, as well as their individualism and rebellion. It might also reveal the tensions within those desires.

As wild escaped convict Burt Reynolds tells his sheriff antagonist (Ned Beatty, in peak sweaty-southern-jagoff form) in White Lightning, there’s only two things he’s scared of: women and police. It’s paradoxical but not unusual for a film of this type to sport both a righteous counterculture attitude and a chauvinist streak. The unquestioning macho virtue of Reynolds’s revenge in the film is, effectively, antiestablishment in nature: he’s seeking revenge on a corrupt policeman who killed his brother over a civil rights protest in the Deep South. Reynolds gets to be the swaggering rebel hero who exacts his revenge plot and wrecks a ton of cars in rambunctious chases along the way—it’s a win-win for him.

White Lightning

Whether playing to the mainstream or the counterculture, seventies car movies often feature attitudes toward, depictions of, and comments about women that go beyond eyebrow-raising and enter the realm of the actively offensive. In the unhinged longhair road odyssey Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), Peter Fonda threatens Susan George (frequently the on-screen target for head-reeling misogyny) with the pungent line: “Every bone in her crotch. That’s what I’m going to break.” And in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Michael Cimino’s buddy-comedy crime caper, some of the throwaway jokes are incredibly jarring: a married couple outside a motel hear a call girl shouting she’s been raped; the husband implies that he wants to hang around to watch. Whether this rampant misogyny is a longstanding feature of machismo-driven car culture—with its history of male competition and girls on the backseat—or a cheap rebuke in the direction of second-wave feminism is hard to say. But it does serve as a reminder that rebellion and freedom were still seen, in Hollywood at least, as exclusive to men.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a particularly incoherent and fascinating entry into the subgenre. Its homoeroticism is so manifest as to barely be subtext: although Jeff Bridges’s dreamy, irresponsible Lightfoot is forever chasing skirts, it’s pretty evident that he has a lovesick, puppyish infatuation with his older friend, Clint Eastwood’s self-assured Korean war vet. Bridges plucks at Eastwood’s shirt flirtatiously, nuzzles close to him, craves a physical affection that Eastwood brushes off throughout; at one point, to pull off a heist, he even dresses in drag and pretends to be Eastwood’s date. It’s a surprising twist on the dirt-flecked, muscular action flicks of the era: there are plenty of surprises here if you’ve come for a meat-and-potatoes crime caper.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may have their eyes on a big score, but their bromance unfolds at a meandering pace and ends in senseless violence. This mood of fatalism had been prevalent in the car or “road” movie at least since Easy Rider (1969), combining the throwback stylings of Americana set adrift with more vagabond uncertainty. By the seventies, races often had no winners and journeys had no destinations. German scholar Thomas Elsaesser probably said it best when he wrote in his 1975 essay on the “unmotivated hero” of the decade’s films that they “speak of a radical skepticism about American virtues of ambition, vision, drive.” And while not all of the era’s films abide by this thinking—the straight-shooting, affirmative macho action of The French Connection (1971) or The Seven-Ups (1973) suggest a more traditional sense of narrative momentum—there’s a startling number that do, from the self-conquering defiance of Vanishing Point (1971) to the anarchic chaos of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.

The car movie was, with a few exceptions, the remit of directors even a hardened cinephile might struggle to name. (Those exceptions are notable: Friedkin, Cimino, Spielberg.) But there are far more like John Hough (Dirty Mary Crazy Larry) and Lamont Johnson (The Last American Hero), the latter a former B-movie actor and television director. Lee H. Katzin was brought onto Steve McQueen’s passion project Le Mans after the better-known John Sturges quit.

This wavering relationship to what is usually glorified about seventies Hollywood—auteurism—is telling. The car movie was in the main made by action craftsmen and people who knew how to pull off a stunt, to race a camera car in an actual Formula 1 circuit, or, like the maverick stunt driver and director-star of Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), H. B. Halicki, were capable of just about anything behind the wheel. This generation amped up the scale and speed of road scenes, making use of fleets of tow trucks, cars as mobile dollies, cameras hitched onto hoods, and gas-and-gristle stunt driving. Halicki, sadly, was killed attempting a stunt while making a sequel to his unexpected box-office hit.

Perhaps the most notable exception to the “no auteurs” rule was Steven Spielberg, who quit before production began on White Lightning, saying he wanted to avoid becoming what he called “a hard-hat, journeyman director.” Spielberg had already made a sterling car movie with Duel (1971), a film of hulking road menace in the form of a demented truck driver chasing down a hapless motorist. That film, too, wants to reinforce masculine power in a traditional way: after the put-upon middle-aged protagonist is emasculated by failing to protect his wife from a would-be sexual assault, he successfully fights off the violent trucker bully and reasserts his manhood.

In the hands of an arguably more nonconformist director like Michael Cimino, the car also served as a potent image of stagnation and lassitude. In the concluding scene of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, finally seated next to his partner in their cushy new white Cadillac with the top down, the wounded Lightfoot rests his head in the passenger seat and dies so peacefully that the sun-browned, all-American boy looks for the world as though he’s sleeping.

The future of American manhood—lost, hurt, sexually and socially confused, optimistic for no good reason—is here and then gone. For all the macho larks and burning rubber of films like this one, you often get the sense that they’re speeding forward with no one behind the wheel.

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Christina Newland is the lead film critic at the i newspaper and a contributing editor at Empire. She has written on film, pop culture, and boxing for Vice, Sight and Sound, the BBC, MUBI’s Notebook, and Reverse Shot, among other publications. Her newsletter on women in crime film and television, Sisters Under the Mink, won a UK Freelance Writing Award in 2021.

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