The Sugarland Express

• Goldie Hawn: Lou Jean Poplin
• Ben Johnson: Captain Harlin Tanner
• Michael Sacks: Patrolman Maxwell Slide
• William Atherton: Clovis Michael Poplin
• Gregory Walcott: Patrolman Ernie Mashburn

The Sugarland Express is the second feature film directed by Steven Spielberg from the year 1974.

Action

The unemployed beautician Lou Jean Poplin helps her husband Clovis Michael Poplin to escape from prison. She wants her son Langston get back to you taken away from her and now with foster parents in Sugar Land, Texas, lives. On the run, the two young petty criminals take the policemen Maxwell Slide hostage. Now they are considered violent kidnappers and be chased by the police under the command of Captain Tanner prudent. They are pursued throughout Texas by a caravan of police and reporters. Maxwell increasingly developing understanding and friendship for both. It however does not succeed dissuade them from their purpose. Due to the media coverage of the run more and more spectators come to the track, which ascribe the hunted courage.

When she finally their destination - the home of the foster parents - reach, sniper wait for the couple, while the living area is cleared. Maxwell warns that it is a trap and the two could die. Lou Jean, however, screams hysterically, that she wants to see her son. Finally Clovis goes to the house and is heavily wounded. The three escape by car to Mexico. When they get stuck at the border river, they are surrounded by police. Clovis dies.

Background

The film is based on a true story. Ila Fae Dent and her husband Robert are on the run after Ila Fae has helped her husband to break out of a prison near Sugar Land, Texas. Ila Fae wanted to prevent that they have to give custody of her child to her mother. On their flight, the pair overwhelmed a police officer, Kenneth Crone, and takes him hostage. In the house of mother Ila Faes it comes to bloody showdown in which Robert is shot. Kenneth Crone was hired as a consultant for the film.

The film is the beginning of the close cooperation with the Spielberg film music composer John Williams, who at any Spielberg film gave the film music from that time until on The Color Purple.

Reviews

• Hans -Christoph Blumenberg, Die Zeit on 24 January 1975: The young Steven Spielberg has his second film so routinely and effectively staged like an old Hollywood pro, this unfortunately but acts on "The Sugarland Express" in spite of the brilliant photography of Vilmos Zsigmond over long routes as a too smooth, too speculative copy of a proven pattern. For America and car fanatics probably still worth seeing.

• Encyclopedia of the International film: Technically perfect and rapidly staged road movie that the bitter moral of the story - the freedom utopia is led ad absurdum by the American law-and -order thinking - sometimes reclaims macabre comedy effects.

Awards

• The film won the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 an award for Best Screenplay, Steven Spielberg was nominated for the Golden Palm.