'Vanishing Point Forever' Examines the Cult Classic Movie That Starred a '70 Dodge Challenger

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The 1971 film Vanishing Point may be the ultimate cult classic car-chase movie. It bombed when it was first released by a confounded Fox studio as its answer to compelling countercultural anti-heroes of the emergent "New Hollywood" like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. But the $1 million movie went on to earn more than $30 million at the box office through extended runs at exploitation-flick "grindhouse" theaters in the U.S., and surprising strength in Europe.

The film is a muddle—thematically, stylistically, musically, narratively—but this, along with a starring role by a speeding, pistol-gripped 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440, is core to its appeal.

"I think what resonates with people is that the movie is very messy and confused as to what it is," says Robert Rubin, a retired financier, former vintage racer, and co-founder of "The Bridge" car show in the Hamptons, who has just written what may be the definitive book on the film: a dense, dizzyingly meta-textual, wildly entertaining, photo-rich brick of cinematic and cultural excavation, called Vanishing Point Forever. (Here's where to order it.) .

"Is it a car chase movie? Is it a parable about surveillance society? Is it a hippie, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll movie?" Rubin asks, rhetorically. "It's a movie that one critic says is in conflict with itself. And so it leaves the possibility of multiple readings open." This confoundment is distilled in the main character, Kowalski, played by Barry Newman, a pill-popping former soldier and cop turned existential warrior, driving at top speed, to a country-fried-funk soundtrack, through an unbuckling America. "Newman himself is kind of a vanilla actor, and the way it's done, Kowalski is kind of a cipher," Rubin says. "And people can identify with him because there's more room to project meanings onto him."

The Challenger certainly aids in this mesmeric perplexity. According to Rubin, when the script was originally written—pseudonymously, by famed Cuban novelist and essayist Guillermo Cabrera Infante—the car was written as a Ford Galaxie 500. "But Chrysler was doing product placement in Hollywood and renting its cars for a dollar a day. Which is why Bullitt and Dirty Harry, Crazy Mary and all these movies have Chargers and Challengers in them," Rubin says.