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The 1970s
Cisco Pike
1972
Karen Black
Scoop's comments:
When I saw this movie in 1972 (yes, I was the
one) I thought it was just another rambling, drug-addled
cinema verite movie which attempted to ride on the Easy
Rider bandwagon with a deliberately casual hand-held
aesthetic and various other similarities to the
Fonda/Hopper box office phenomenon.
Let's see. Pretty cool drug dealer with a conscience.
He's not really a "hero" but a classic
late-60s/early-70s antihero. He wanders around making
deals, but is really hoping to get out of dealing. He
spends a lot of time driving around wordlessly while
complete songs play on the soundtrack, creating trite
"mood footage." He has a buddy who is not as cool and,
in fact, is kind of wasted and pathetic. They meander
from place to place, pick up two hot chicks and have
drug-distorted adventures. Karen Black is on hand. Cops
are mean pigs. Along the way, the dealer loses one of
his companions to 70s Death Syndrome, a disease which
had two variants, either OD or KBR (killed by rednecks).
The whole thing leads up to a wildly melodramatic
guns-blazing climax.
Now which movie was I just writing about, Easy Rider or
Cisco Pike?
When this film came out it was a complete failure. It
just seemed to consist of a bunch of stock 1972
characters running around doing the usual stuff they did
in all counter-culture movies. It didn't provide any
insight because you could walk down the city streets
yourself for 48 hours and experience the same sorts of
random characters and disconnected events. The critics
raped the film. The DVD box is promoted with the
damnation of Leonard Maltin's faint praise that it is
"surprisingly good." One might make the point that this
is not really praise by noting that his comment is
"surprisingly accurate." Audiences stayed away from
Cisco Pike, and I hated it as well, after watching it in
an empty theater as part of a double feature. That's
right! The studio was so convinced of its total lack of
drawing power that they packaged Cisco as part of a
double bill (a rarity in 1972) with some dubbed
four-year-old "Spaghetti gangster" film called Machine
Gun McCain, a film which held a certain fascination for
me because Jim Morrison of the Doors had a small acting
role.
We see Cisco Pike in a different light today. In 1972
all the cool-ass 70s iconography in this movie was lost
because it was familiar. Hell, in 1972 you'd never
really notice a lava-lamp on a guy's desk because it was
just part of the background. Today, however, lava-lamps
are iconic and ironic 70s symbols, and they draw
immediate attention to their presence, as the one in
this film did. That provides a metaphor for the entire
film - it's a cinematic lava-lamp. It draws one's
attention to an alien culture long since disappeared,
and offers a snapshot of times and attitudes generally
forgotten. It pictures the era as it saw itself, and
also gives us an intimate glimpse at Hollywood's 1972
theories about marketing to the counter-culture. It is a
priceless cultural artifact which provides an authentic
time-travel experience that could not be duplicated by
watching a 2006 film about 1972.
Sure it's dated, but to me that's what makes it so much
more interesting today than it was in 1972. People would
watch it in 1972 and ask "Why does this film exist?"
Now, 34 years later, there is a value to the film: Cisco
Pike is a magnificent time capsule.
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