 Now you see him, now you don't.  
The open road adventure Vanishing Point is one of cinema history's most beloved cult classics. You know the story probably. Barry Newman plays a guy hired to drive a beautiful 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum from Denver to San Francisco. He decides to do it in record time, and this brings him the attention of police, who try to stop him. It's austere, introspective, and mystical, and is an interesting commentary on the rootlessness and disillusionment of Vietnam War vets. Highly recommended. And as a bonus, not only do you get to watch that Challenger move at high speed, but there's the classic naked-woman-riding-her-motorcycle-through-the-desert scene starring Gilda Texter. The scene made Texter famous, but she only appeared in a few more productions. Ironically, though, she had a forty year career in another area of cinema—costume and wardrobe design. We consider Vanishing Point to be her best wardrobe work. You see two Japanese promo posters above, six production photos below, and can see four more, along with further discussion of the film, at this link.       
 Your life can change forever in a thousand miles of open road.        
Vanishing Point’s hard-driving anti-hero Kowalski is nobody special before the fateful moment he decides to deliver a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in fifteen hours. He has to drive like a bat out of hell to do it, and suddenly what could have been a meaningless trip becomes instead a deadly serious rebuke to authority. Kowalski burns up mile after mile of open road, ripping along in a wash of dust and noise, and occasionally stopping to meet some of the denizens of the vast American west. This is one of the best counterculture movies ever made, in our humble view. Like Easy Rider, it portrays the establishment as fiercely opposed to freedom, and exposes its patriotic rhetoric as empty of substance. The two movies are almost companion pieces, telling us that when you rattle your cage, trouble will always be waiting around the next bend, or just over the horizon. Vanishing Point premiered in the U.S. today, 1971.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1958—Workers Assemble First Corvette
Workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, assemble the first Corvette, a two-seater sports car that would become an American icon. The first completed production car rolls off the assembly line two days later, one of just 300 Corvettes made that year. 1950—U.S. Decides To Fight in Korea
After years of border tensions on the partitioned Korean peninsula, U.S. President Harry Truman orders U.S. air and sea forces to help the South Korean regime repel an invasion by the North. Soon the U.S. is embroiled in a war that lasts until 1953 and results in a million combat dead and at least two million civilian deaths, with no measurable gains for either side. 1936—First Helicopter Flight
In Berlin, Germany, in a sports stadium, Ewald Rohlfs takes the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 on its first flight. It is the first fully-controllable helicopter, featuring two counter rotating rotors mounted on the chassis of a training aircraft. Only two are ever produced, and neither survive today. 1963—John F. Kennedy Visits Berlin
22 months after East Germany erects the Berlin Wall as a barrier to prevent movement between East and West Berlin, John F. Kennedy visits West Berlin and speaks the famous words "Ich bin ein Berliner." Suggestions that Kennedy misspoke and in reality called himself a jelly donut are untrue.
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