STEVEN SPIELBERG: THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974) / LINCOLN (2012)
Amblin’ was almost the choice here for Spielberg’s first film, given that it was his first theatrical release and meant so much to him that he named his entire production company after it. But Amblin’ was technically a short, and to keep the boundaries here clear we’re sticking with first feature length films (although doing it this way means that we’ve had to miss out on the story of how Quentin Tarantino’s first film – a 70 minute black and white amateur production called My Best Friend’s Birthday (1987) – took four years to make, and was then destroyed by a studio fire during the editing process, leaving just 36 minutes of footage intact. But never mind.). This brings us then to The Sugarland Express, which lines up against Lincoln, nearly 40 years later.
The Sugarland Express is the partially true story of a woman and her jail-sprung husband who go on the run to prevent the permanent adoption of their young son by foster parents. Lincoln is a historical epic, outlining the last four months of the life of President Abraham Lincoln as he struggles to bring his slave-emancipation bill to pass during the final stages of the American Civil war.
Saying that Spielberg has a legacy in historical epics is a bit like saying that William Hoover has a legacy in vacuum cleaners; Spielberg is a leading master of the great story and his latest is no exception. The bleak atmosphere of the war made palpable through a dense, grey script and even denser, greyer surroundings, Lincoln is imposing in every way that the gritty, neo-noir Sugarland is not. Spielberg also underplays the more obvious drama of Lincoln’s story (his assassination, for anyone who’s recently arrived from another planet) – in order to prevent it from overshadowing the true legacy of what he accomplished while he was alive.
But even though Lincoln is a perfect example of Spielberg’s ability to deliver high-quality drama, what his first film tells us clearly is that no-one had to wait to see this from him. There is not a trace of debut-feel in Sugarland’s smooth pace and expert cinematography – Spielberg had by this time even drafted in John Williams for the soundtrack (who, to cut a long story short, stuck around with Spielberg after this for so long that he also wrote the soundtrack to Lincoln).
Perhaps what is most noticeably different about Sugarland however is that there is very little of what we would normally associate with Spielberg’s films today; whatever it is that Spielberg is doing – whether it be dinosaurs or Roald Dahl – most people are aware of it. Sugarland is much lower key – much less ambitious – and despite decent critical acclaim, it flopped with general audiences. The young Spielberg naturally would have wondered about this. “What was the problem?”, he probably thought to himself. Why had The Sugarland Express not been the celebrated debut that it should have been? Were the audiences that had so enjoyed the antihero/crime themes in Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider only a few years earlier now wanting something slightly more upbeat and obvious – something with a less serious narrative, that focused more on straightforward entertainment and that required less concentration and emotional involvement? Something that included an enormous, rogue, man-eating shark perhaps? Would that get the audiences’ attention more effectively?
Yep.
