The Sugarland Express at 50: Steven Spielberg on the Road to Greatness

A little more than 50 years ago, a certain young director with a couple of well-liked TV movies to his name, but who had yet to release a film straight into theaters, was reading the newspaper. He came across the story of Bobby and Ila Fae Dent: a young couple embroiled in a custody battle unlike any other. A lightbulb went on over his head. The Sugarland Express was born, and Steven Spielberg started down the path to half a century of movie theater domination.

Everyone thinks Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) is mad to break her husband Clovis (William Atherton) out of jail when he only has four months left of his sentence. Lou Jean doesn’t care. Following her own arrest for petty larceny, their baby Langston was taken into foster care, and even after doing her time, the powers that be are disinclined to give him back. So she, and Clovis, are going to Sugarland, Texas, to get him.

After the escape, through a series of blunders and misunderstandings, the two end up accidentally taking a cop, Officer Slide (Michael Sacks), hostage. That complicates things, to put it mildly. Now, their trip to Sugarland comes complete with a voluminous police escort, a host of vigilantes eager to use Lou Jean and Clovis as target practice, and even more well-wishers who show up along the route to pay tribute to these inadvertent anti-establishment heroes. 

While The Sugarland Express was the first film of Spielberg’s to be released directly into theaters, it wasn’t the first to show up in them. Much loved man-versus-killer truck movie Duel may have been made for TV, but it proved so successful that more footage was shot to take it from 74 to 90 minutes, and then it received a theatrical release across Europe, Japan and Australia in 1972 and 1973—although it wouldn’t get theatrical distribution in the U.S. until 1983. 

Besides also being considered a Spielberg debut, Duel and The Sugarland Express share a lot of marrow, primarily in that they see the road as a place both of great beauty and great menace. And yet The Sugarland Express is also very much a part of the mini-trend that formed in the wake of the massive success of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us were all released between 1972 and 1974 (Thieves Like Us beat The Sugarland Express to the punch by only a month), and all played heavily on the romance, excitement and violence of a young couple on the run. Adding to the cine-stew is a dollop of Ace in the Hole’s influence, in the rabidity with which the media swallows up the story of Clovis and Lou Jean.

In comparison to its stablemates, The Sugarland Express is considerably goofier—at least at first. Spielberg makes a delicious three-course meal of the comic setpieces, with the sight of the ever-growing, farcically huge parade of cop cars following our bumbling bandits a continuous source of hilarity. When our duo’s vehicle runs out of gas early on, the parade gets even more comical as the lead cop car, driven by the sympathetic Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson), has to gently shunt it along to the nearest gas station. Spielberg adds a grace note to the silliness with a shot of Lou Jean and Captain Tanner acknowledging each other with a smile as the whole debacle takes place; besides being a lovely bit of blocking, grounding a big setpiece in a small human moment would become a Spielberg trademark. Still, some of these sequences are just plain funny, like the grand logistical furor that takes place when Lou Jean really needs to use a porta-potty.

At the end of the day, we know that Clovis and Lou Jean aren’t going to get what they want (we all remember what happened to Bonnie and Clyde). From the outset, even Clovis deeply doubts that their mission has any chance of succeeding, but he’s wildly in love with Lou Jean, and would probably jump straight off a cliff if she asked him to. The apparent inevitability of doom is easy to push off to one side when their destination is so many hundreds of miles down the road.

The nearer they get though, the thicker the atmosphere of dread grows. When vigilantes catch up with them in a used car lot, The Sugarland Express completely drops the humor for the first time and becomes just plain frightening, with the gangly youth of Goldie Hawn and William Atherton (who were both in their late twenties, but seem considerably younger) emphasizing the desperate vulnerability of Clovis and Lou Jean.

Soon after, the two and their hostage (who’s more of a friend by this point, having realized their essential naivety and sweet natures) arrive at a small town near the end of their journey, where the citizens are actually throwing them a parade. The whole thing takes on the air of a sickening fever dream; we can’t enjoy the clamor of the crowd or their ridiculous gifts (someone gives Lou Jean a piglet, who promptly pees on her) and signs (“Our Name is Poplin Too!”) because we can feel so strongly that something bad is coming. It’s inescapably poignant, with these two nobodies enjoying the sensation of being somebody for the first time in their lives—temporarily able to delude themselves that they might just pull this off in the glow of all that excitement. The way Spielberg shepherds this scene, and The Sugarland Express as whole, through all these different tones has a quietly dazzling confidence, befitting a director teetering on the edge of greatness. 

And while The Sugarland Express was not very successful upon release—not a titanic flop, but neither what anyone deemed a hit—the films that came after certainly were. In the 10-year stretch that followed his theatrical feature debut, Spielberg would direct Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T, and the first two Indiana Jones movies. (To be fair, there was also 1941 and his segment in the disastrous ‘80s Twilight Zone movie, but nobody’s perfect!) As the movie that came just before an almost unparalleled run like that, it’s no wonder that something as comparatively minor key as The Sugarland Express would get lost in the shuffle. 

But watching The Sugarland Express today, knowing what we do about the behemoth Spielberg would become, it’s fascinating to see how accomplished he was right at the beginning of his career, riding a cultural wave just before he’d be the one making them.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.