Vanishing Point (1971)
Directed by Richard C. Sarafian
Kowalski works for a car delivery service, and takes delivery of a 1970 Dodge Challenger to drive from Colorado to San Francisco. Shortly after pickup, he takes a bet to get the car there in less than 15 hours.
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What critics compared Vanishing Point to
"Need for Speed" is filled with tributes to -- and ripoffs of -- vintage car flicks: A drive-in theater plays "Bullitt," a cop car loses its back axle a la "American Grafitti," and Keaton's character is an update of Cleavon Little's jive-talking radio DJ from the 1971 cult classic "Vanishing Point."
Entering the race involves Tobey getting the crew back together, driving cross-country and unconvincingly falling in love with car expert Julia ( Imogen Poots ) and attracting the attention of eccentric rich race organizer, Monarch ( Michael Keaton , who apparently pocketed a big check for sitting in a room and giving us a third-rate impersonation of Cleavon Little in “Vanishing Point”).
“Need for Speed,” a tricked-up, morally dubious videogame spin-off about driving really, really fast while cops and citizens crash into trees behind you, is made possible by three things: The success of the “Fast and Furious” series, the rise of “Breaking Bad” co-star Aaron Paul, and a 1971 vroom-vroom classic called “Vanishing Point.”
That's Michael Keaton talking, soul-patched, sunglassed, and functioning a lot like the Cleavon Little character in the 1971 road- pic cult classic Vanishing Point.
The film would hardly win the Bechtel Test though the chemistry between Breaking Bad’s Paul and Poots is sweetly appealing and there’s a few nods to 1971’s Vanishing Point as Michael Keaton’s ranting DJ race guru waxes lyrical to his internet audience but it’s all just window dressing for the real reason to see this film: the cars and the racing.
It all reminds me of the cult movie “Vanishing Point,” back in 1971.
Although it is probably now best known as the film that inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007)--or at least was the film most frequently named-checked--Vanishing Point should be seen as a particularly charged variant of a now extinct genre: the artsy B-movie.
I know Tarantino would love to take the credit for the popularity and new found interest in “Vanishing Point,” thanks to his repeated references to the movie in his underrated “Death Proof,” but that’s simply presumptuous, considering many people have been singing the praises of “Vanishing Point” for years and years.
In form, Death Proof is a homage to fast car thrillers of the 1970s - particularly Vanishing Point - coupled with the sexually predatory style of a sinister 1970s slasher movie.
The film revs across the screen with the kinetic vibe that made “Vanishing Point” a drive-in hit of the 1970s.
It would be irresponsible to divulge much more about Nichols' boldly envisioned new movie, which follows 2012's Mud (Matthew McConaughey as an escaped con, Tye Sheridan as the boy he befriends) and which calls to mind titles as divergent as the '70s road pic Vanishing Point, certain iconic Steven Spielberg efforts (no, not Jaws), and the just-out 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Drive, which won Nicolas Winding Refn the Best Director prize at Cannes last spring, is a sharply etched, finely tuned homage to the existential road movies of the 1970s like Vanishing Point (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) in which the nature of human existence was fused with the open road.
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The picture riffs on the seedy pleasures of ’70s drive-in classics like Walter Hill’s The Driver—which Wright has cited as an influence—and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point.
Cinema has been dabbling with this idea from time to time whether it’s Walter Hill’s The Driver, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point or Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job.
Its roots lie in the cycle of quasi-mystical car movies that followed Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop , where fast driving was a way for a man (and it was always a man) to achieve a kind of existential purity, to break society’s shackles and simply be.
But it turns out the world really, really needed a movie that asked "What would happen if you meshed Drive, Vanishing Point and the robbery scene from Heat and made it a funk-scored opera?"
“Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” “Badlands.”
What clears him with his accusers is his unabashed admission of his influences within his films, be it Lady Snowblood and Shogun Assassin in Kill Bill , Vanishing Point in Death Proof , or The Dirty Dozen for Inglourious Basterds .
Alas, director Richard C. Sarafian, who started his career directing television in the early ’60s, never reached the echelon occupied by those filmmakers, but his name will forever be associated with the cult status of Vanishing Point, which, like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), sought to personify the schisms in American culture, particularly the tensions between the counterculture and the establishment, along the rush of the open highway.