A man, a car, the road, and the end of America. This became kind of a theme in the seventies, and Vanishing Point is the classic example, with scorching driving and a nihilistic ending that actually shocks.

Barry Newman is Kowalski, a speed-popping driver who lives on the road, delivering cars cross-country. When he picks up a supercharged 1970 Dodge Challenger in Denver, he bets his dealer that he can make it to San Francisco -- sorry, that'd be "Frisco" -- in 15 hours, and to quote George Jones, "The race is on!"

Within ten minutes of the opening credits, with no provocation, Kowalski is outrunning a motorcycle cop, and a full-scale police chase follows. A radio DJ called Super Soul (Cleavon Little, best known as the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles) hears the chatter on the police scanner, and as he spreads the word of Kowalski's run, he's turned into a folk hero celebrity: "the last American hero, the electric centaur, the demigod, the super driver of the American West," a symbol of outlaw freedom to the counterculture holdouts.

Bursts of flashback show Kowalski's previous life, the road that led him to the seat he's in -- racing dirt bikes and stock cars, working as a cop, romancing a girlfriend who drowned -- and we later find out he was wounded in Vietnam. Kowalski is a hero to some, but there are other opinions. A racist mob attacks Super Soul in his studio, smashing his equipment after he warns Kowalski on-air that the border into California -- that old bastion of free love and the end zone of Manifest Destiny -- is guarded by an army of state troopers.

A biker brings Kowalski to his desert crash pad for a reload of Benzedrine, where he meets a naked girl on a motorcycle (billed simply as "Nude Rider") who turns out to be the only one who really knows who Kowalski is: a hero cop framed for drugs when he stopped his partner from sexually abusing a suspect.

He makes it over the California border, then ends up on the stretch of road that opened the movie: two bulldozers blocking the road, a line of cops on either side, a news truck and gawkers looking on. Glazed, dazed, with a smile on his speedy, sweating face, Kowalski hammers it straight at the bulldozers at a hundred and sixty-five, and crashes right into them. No foreshadowing, no musical cue, just a car exploding into flame.

Then, while a gospel song plays over the closing credits, the crowd picks over the wreckage, yanking at the smoking seats, taking pictures of the shattered car. Now that's an ending.

Later movies like Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run would play the high-speed outlaw for laughs, but here it's straight. There was a moment of post-hippie anxiety in American movies when this was pretty common, as America, and particularly the West, became resigned to the fact that outlaws were gone, the open road was patrolled by traffic planes, and even in California you could never beat the Man (1967 may have been the summer of love, but it was also the year Reagan became governor).

But this is hardly a message movie. The stunt driving is amazing, with cinematography that puts the camera right on the hood, like you are the car. There's a hypnotic quality that makes it like real driving, always that tailpipe roar of the engines and the shimmering highway.

Vanishing Point casts a long shadow through pop culture, with nods from Guns N' Roses, Audioslave, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, and the Scottish alt band Primal Scream, who in 1997 released an album called Vanishing Point that was supposed to be an alternate soundtrack.

Also in 1997, an unfortunate TV remake starred a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen as Kowalski, Jason Priestley as the DJ, and Peta Wilson of La Femme Nikita as the Non-Nude Rider (which does kind of miss the point). The anarchic ride of the original was watered down to a guy racing to the side of his sick, pregnant wife, and even when he blasts into the roadblock after she dies, the voice-over epilogue by Jason Priestley -- words that should never be put together -- says he may have bailed out. Yawn.

Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly is rumored to be working on a remake, and so is Dodge; the new Challenger looks suspiciously like the 1970 classic. But Vanishing Point catches a certain moment that no retread will really be able to duplicate.

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