With only four months left on her husband’s prison sentence, Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) near-spontaneously springs Clovis (William Atherton) from imminent release and the two set out to retrieve their fostered child Langston from his new parents. Things inevitably go awry, leading to the couple taking Patrolman Slide (Michael Sacks) hostage in his patrol car and lead one of the slowest, and silliest, car chases across Texas.

My quest to fill in my Spielberg blind spots begins at the beginning, with his first officially cinematically released picture. Not only had I never seen The Sugarland Express, I couldn’t have told you anything about it other than it starred Goldie Hawn, and that’s only because she’s quite rightly all across the poster. It turns out this is a kind of hang-out caper road movie, following a collection of likeable fools trying to make their way across a sea of real life. Lou Jean has a plan to break Clovis out – she lures him into the restroom and reveals she’s wearing two sets of clothing, one for him, so they can just walk out of there – but that’s where her plan ends. If they hadn’t been able to blag a ride from the parents of one of Clovis’ friends, there’s every chance they’d have been caught in seconds. That’s the fun of this journey though, seeing this pair of desperate dummies navigate the world whilst outright refusing to plan beyond the next few minutes, even if it gets a tad frustrating that they continue to make just outright terrible decisions. Although, to be fair, from their perspective there’s just no good right option, so they plough ahead regardless of common sense.

Fresh off her Oscar win for Cactus Flower, Hawn is an adorable firebrand lighting up every scene she’s in and making it not hard at all to believe how everyone she encounters falls for her naïve charms. Atherton is good, and this isn’t his fault, but it’s nigh on impossible not to kind of hate him in every scene thanks to the career of shit-heels and rat-schmucks he’s played across Die Hard, Ghostbusters, Real Genius etc. Michael Sacks is also good as Slide, though he understandably gets the least to do out of the trio. Another recent Oscar winner, Ben Johnson (for The Last Picture Show), shows up around a third of the way in (at what I like to call the Marge Gundersson point) as Captain Tanner, the senior officer leading the literal chase for our heroes. Johnson is a solid, non-nonsense presence, not even trying to take over command of the film, which is just as well, there’d be no wrestling this from Hawn.

I could have perhaps used a little more time with some of the more eclectic members of the supporting cast, with the only real highlights being the clueless getaway drivers the Nockers (A.L. Camp & Jessie Lee Julton), with Mr. Nocker driving slow slowly, turning around to talk to his passengers the whole time, whilst his wife is hunched forward, fingernails digging into the dashboard for dear life. Their car is Lou Jean and Clovis’ first vehicle repossessed on their quest (“Ah shit, our car is stole!”), stranding the Nockers on the side of the road, and I dearly wish we’d kept cutting back to them throughout the film, still standing there days later waiting for another ride to show up.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with The Sugarland Express, so much so that I’m surprised it’s not discussed more, but then again with a career as prolifically momentous as Spielberg’s, you just can’t talk about everything all the time! A Blues Brothers-esque amount of cop cars get totalled, and the whole chase – and indeed, the whole film – has to pause for Lou Jean to have a pee, with the police bringing in a portaloo (Handy-Can) to preserve her modesty. The shoot-out at the used car lot lost my attention a little, but when Captain Tanner showed up and enacted some justice it soon perked back up again.

There’s a few of Spielberg’s calling cards dotted around – cranky old people and local yokels hell bent on being heroes without the help of the local authorities come straight out of Jaws, there are some figures-silhouetted-against-dusk shots eerily reminiscent of Raiders, and Patrolman Slide’s drunken detainee Buster (Buster Daniels) having difficulty with his seatbelt can’t help but call out Dr Alan Grant on the helicopter.

The Sugarland Express is good-to-great. If it weren’t directed by Spielberg it’d likely be a forgotten gem, a relatively small story with personal stakes, told well and entertainingly, whose conclusion is sadly inevitable but the journey remains fun regardless.

Choose Film 8/10