The Passenger (1975) : The Return of A Unique Ride

IN 1975, going to movies held more surprises for adult audiences than we would see for the next quarter-century. That year "Jaws" came out and two years later came "Star Wars", films that had a traditional melodramatic format to tell their exciting stories in. Producers and directors took these essentially "B" type action movies, high on action and less concerned with social commentary, and noted the box-office takes and then set out for a couple decades to ape the success of these old school" films that Messers Spielberg and George Lucas made.

There's nothing wrong with the traditional "Hollywood narrative" flow of a melodrama or a comedy, where good triumphs over evil and the boy gets the girl and the monsterous fish dies. As in all good stories, there are plot twists and setbacks in both kinds of films, but in the so-called "traditional;" movie the world is balanced out all right in the end. I love those movies when they are done well as much as the next cinema nut.

But something was lost when traditional action/suspense film came to dominate the big screen: a lot of "personal" films got squeezed out of distribution or were put in big-studio limbo and never got off the ground. Although there were exceptions, American avant-garde and risky movies like "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), "Easy Rider", (1969) "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), "M*A*S*H" (1970), "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971) , "Pocket Money"(1972) , "The Hired Hand" (1973) "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"(1971), The Parallax View (1974), "Badlands" (1973) ,"Paper Moon" and "The Conversation" (1974) were no longer models for the studios to try and emulate. The audience wanted more normal films that linked them to the American past where good was good and bad was bad and that was that.

The mainstream cinema lost all but the occasional mature films that relied on character over action to say something about people and the dar kglass that many of us tried to view our lices in.

Some movies similar to the above still got made now and then like "Nashville" (1976) or "Days of Heaven" (1979) but they were a dying breed.

One of the last films that challenged, enlightened and disturbed audiences before traditional narratives reasserted themselves was Michaelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger. If you take a look at the trailer for this film you would think it's a straight-forward tale that happens to be about a reporter (Jack Nicholson, in one of his best performances) who switches identities and tries to kick over his traces from his employers, friends and loved ones to start a new life.

But looks can be deceiving. "The Passenger" is about more than a suspense story of how a man may or may not be able to make himself over and finds himself a new girlfriend and a couple of bad thugs trying to chase him down. Antonioni's film avoids melodrama as much as possible and fouses on the existenial dilemma of a educated middle-aged adult with a profession, an identity and habits that cannot be so easily broken by his will to be reborn a new and free being with no attachments to his past.

The story itself has a compelling, Hitchcock-style set up to it, simialr to Antonioni's other English-language film from Swinging London, "Blow Up" (1966). But in both films the director tells the story in a hypnotic and almost dream-like way, not heightening the suspense so much as prolonging the time you spend with the main character and his girl friend (Maria Schneider) until you feel that things are happening in real time and you are a voyeur into two people's private and desperate lives. It's no Hitchcock film: its a quiet and unsettling film and where Hitchcock's genius was in working the camera to just the right point of attention you needed to get the most of a scene, often Antonioni will just let a camera linger over his subjects, making the viewer look for what's important to find. The final scene in the movie is one long five minute shot and you have to really pay attention to get the impact of it.

With some films, this could easily be pretentious and tedious and somethimes as in the 14-minute "two lovers don't keep a date on a street and nothing happens" section of his earlier film "The Ellipse" (1962) with the lovely Monica Vitti Mr. Antonioni could get pretentious toward a finale. But in the Nicholson/Schneider film, as in "Blow Up" and his masterwork of interpersonal alienation, L'Avventura (1960) the director hits the finish dead solid.

Personal note: I came of age as an independant filmgoer, watching some of the movies I've listed above as they came out in regular neighborhood theaters. (Ironically I didn't see "The Passenger" until it was on chopped up and put on late-night television one night. As I recall, it didn't play in the small town I lived in back in '75.)

And I'd be lying if I told you I was some kind of precocious kid back then who understood the full impact these movies had on me. In many ways, these "special films" In many ways, they were not all that extra different to me back then from a now-half forgotten Burt Reynolds or a John Wayne vehicle of the time, say, in terms of entertainment value.

But, given the passage of time, certain scenes in movies like "Easy Rider", "The Conversation" or "The Parallax View" have become more memorable and illuminating to me, and caused me to long for and crave going back to them in ways I never would for, say, a 1970's Clint Eastwood vehicle like "Magnum Force" (1973)or "Joe Kidd" (1971) .

I know its dangerous to romanticize an era of films and actors, directors, et al, just because you happened to be around for your first exposure to the adult world when these particular movies came out. But I think in this case the best films of directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Terence Malick, Alan Pakula and the European "maestros" like Francois Trufault, Federico Fellini and Antonioni hold up because each of them had something strong and forceful to convey about the world and built true vision into their films, creating images and moments that burned into your subconcious forever.

The DVD of "The Passenger" also features a seperate trac featuring a narrative of the film by Jack Nicholson himself. He called working with Antonioni one of if not the the most important experiencess of his working life. I loved the challenge of getting into this movie. It may not be the type of film I want to see all the time, but I think its a great detour.