Gimme Some Sugar

There are a handful of Steven Spielberg movies I've never seen, but it felt like one of the biggest oversights was his very first one. Not the made-for-TV movie Duel -- I actually have seen that -- but his feature debut, The Sugarland Express. I recently decided to cross it off the list.

This 1974 movie is based on a true story of a woman who busts her husband out of prison to go after the child who has been taken from them and placed in foster care. That prison break soon turns into a police abduction and a caravan of cop cars crossing Texas.

At first blush, this might not sound like Steven Spielberg fare, but it makes sense as you start to dig in. That made-for-TV movie I mentioned, Duel, is the story of road rage coming back to bite a man when he's stalked by a big rig; one can imagine a producer thinking that the man who directed that would be good for this story essentially about a prolonged "car chase." There is a family thread at the core of this that's common to so many of Spielberg's movies. And there's a lightness here just like you'll find in most of Spielberg's work (in the moments when "wonder" is not front and center).

Even though it's his first film, Spielberg is already being quite ambitious. Working with his cinematographer, he loads this movie up with flashy photography: long single takes that sweep the environment around a moving car, big crowd scenes peppered with memorable one-line characters, thoughtful landscape shots to set a scene, and more. And he's already found his life-long collaborator John Williams, who here provides a score that's almost nothing like you'd expect a John Williams score to sound, a smaller affair buoyed by solo harmonica.

The cast is fascinating. Goldie Hawn stars as Lou Jean Poplin, the mastermind who's anything but. It's a subtle shift to turn the blonde ditz she was known to play at the time into this self-deluded wild card, but that subtlety allows the performance to be both comedic and dramatic, and it's quite strong.

Her husband Clovis is played by William Atherton, aka the guy you know as the villain in every 1980s movie that called for someone ten years older than William Zabka. If you grew up not sympathizing with Atherton, like me, this role will knock your cinematic world a little off its axis in a fun way.

The patrolman caught up in their crime spree is played by Michael Sacks, who didn't stick with acting long after this. Sure, you couldn't say at this time that you'd "done a Steven Spielberg movie" (and have that mean anything); still, you'd think an unusual performance like this might have earned him enough later work to keep him in the business.

But I don't mean to praise The Sugarland Express overmuch. It's fun, but it's also quite slight. The script by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins is nothing particularly memorable. There's no truly exciting action. It's "comedy of errors" meets "road trip," which is something of an unusual formula that nevertheless yields a fairly predictable movie. It's an interesting artifact of curiosity in the career of one of the most successful directors living today... but it's hardly essential to understanding his work.

I'd give The Sugarland Express a B-. If you're aiming at becoming a Spielberg completist? Well, then, there are worse movies in his catalog, and you can watch this knowing "it's alright." If you don't ever expect you might watch all his films? You might just as well skip this one, then.