[3] The film follows a woman (Goldie Hawn) and her husband (William Atherton) as they take a police officer (Michael Sacks) hostage and flee across Texas while they try to get to their child before he is placed in foster care.

Although Williams re-recorded the main theme with Toots Thielemans and the Boston Pops Orchestra for 1991's The Spielberg/Williams Collaboration,[6] the score was not released as an album until June 15, 2024, coinciding with the film's 50th anniversary.

An epilogue preceding the closing credits explains that Lou Jean subsequently spent fifteen months of a five-year prison term in a women's correctional facility.

[citation needed] After working as a television director, Steven Spielberg made his first stand alone feature film-length production with the TV movie Duel, released in November 1971.

After that he persuaded co-producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to let him make his big-screen directorial debut with The Sugarland Express, which was based on a true story.

A 50th anniversary retrospective screening of the film, which was followed by a Q&A with Spielberg and Variety exclusive editor Brent Lang, took place at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 15, 2024, which also included a surprise video greeting from Goldie Hawn.

This resulted in Universal declaring the film a box office failure and pulling it from theaters after just two weeks into its initial theatrical release.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Its plot may ape the countercultural road movies of its era, but Steven Spielberg's feature debut displays many of the crowd-pleasing elements he'd refine in subsequent films.

[15] Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "If the movie finally doesn’t succeed, that’s because Spielberg has paid too much attention to all those police cars (and all the crashes they get into), and not enough to the personalities of his characters.

"[16] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded the same two-and-a-half star grade and wrote that "whereas Bonnie and Clyde prompted our sympathy for its heroes because of their winning style, The Sugarland Express asks us to care for Clovis and Lou Jean because they are thick-skulled and because, presumably, every mother has an inherent right to raise her own baby.

"[17] Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called Hawn's performance "generally delightful" but found that "something happens to the picture" toward the end as "the story opts for an abrupt series of production number shootouts, as though this was the real purpose in making the film, and all that preceded was introductory filler and vamp.

Starting out as a comedy that gradually darkens, 'The Sugarland Express,' which is based on an actual incident, becomes an increasingly disenchanted portrait of contemporary America.

"[22] Pauline Kael wrote that "In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience, this is one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies.

"[23] David Thomson sees the film as a natural followup to Duel: "Sugarland Express is another epic of the road—raucous, feverish, and based on an actual incident.