Trailer
Plot summary
Kowalski drives cars for a living, and late on a Friday night he reaches Denver with a black Imperial. Sandy, the delivery clerk, urges him to rest, but he wants to begin his next job at once: a white 1970 Dodge Challenger that must reach San Francisco by Monday. Just before midnight he stops at a biker bar parking lot to buy Benzedrine pills, and there he makes a bet with Jake, his dealer, that San Francisco will be reached by three on Sunday afternoon, a day early. His file, which the police read out, and flashbacks cover Vietnam War service, motorcycle and race car driving, and a police career that ended after he kept a superior officer from raping a young woman. On the Colorado road, over the speed limit, he draws two motorcycle officers into pursuit.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Vanishing Point (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The director wanted Gene Hackman to play Kowalski, but 20th Century Fox studio executive Richard Zanuck insisted on casting relatively unknown Barry Newman in the lead role instead.
- The screenplay was written by Cuban-born G. Cabrera Infante under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain and based on two real events: the disgraced career of a San Diego police officer, and a high-speed pursuit of a man who refused to stop and died crashing into a police roadblock.
SPOILER
For the end-of-film crash into the bulldozers, a quarter-mile cable linked the Challenger to an explosives-laden 1967 Chevrolet Camaro with its motor and transmission removed; Loftin towed it into the blades at high speed, expecting an end-over-end flip but getting a stuck car he thought looked better.- Financial troubles at the studio forced Zanuck to shorten director Sarafian's planned 60-day shoot by 22 days, and Sarafian responded by dropping certain scenes rather than rushing through the rest of the schedule.
- Sarafian wanted to score most of the film from Delaney, Bonnie & Friends' album Motel Shot, but Fox music head Lionel Newman refused over the cost of the rights, and the studio also turned down Sarafian's suggestion of Randy Newman.
- To convey the appearance of speed, the filmmakers slowed the camera's film rate; in the Challenger and Jaguar scenes it was halved, and the cars, doing about 50 mi/h, looked much faster when projected normally.
SPOILER
Barry Newman was encouraged by the film's stunt coordinator, Loftin, to do some of his own driving; in the scene before Kowalski crashes into the bulldozer, Newman drove and performed a 180-degree turn on the road himself without the director's knowledge.- Edgar Wright named Vanishing Point one of his 1,000 favorite films and used it as inspiration for his 2017 film Baby Driver.
