Dir. Richard C. Sarafian. United States. 1971, 98 mins. 4K DCP. With Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger. Friday, midnight, somewhere in Denver, Colorado, car service driver Kowalski (Newman) bets his drug dealer he can deliver his white 1970 Dodge Challenger to San Francisco by 3 p.m. He burns rubber with a growing police phalanx hot on his tail. Showcasing the greatest sequence of car chase stunts in the history of cinema, Vanishing Point pulls double duty as a post-’68 allegory for the closing of the American frontier.

The great American car chase movie, directed by maverick Armenian-American filmmaker Richard C. Sarafian, is nominally the saga of a Vietnam vet on the lam in his Dodge Challenger, but it’s simultaneously a modern-day Western, a dystopian allegory, and a love letter to the muscle car. A cult classic, adored by artists and filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg to Bruce Springsteen, Guns ‘n’ Roses and Alberto Moravia, Vanishing Point had a storied production, the lore and legends of which are now lovingly collected in Robert M. Rubin’s mythic illustrated account Vanishing Point Forever.

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