Vanishing Point is a 1971 American action film directed by Richard C. Sarafian, starring Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, and Dean Jagger.

The delivery service clerk, Sandy, urges him to get some rest, but Kowalski insists on getting started with his next assignment: delivering a white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum (with top speeds exceeding 160 miles per hour [260 km/h]) to San Francisco by Monday.

Before leaving Denver, Kowalski pulls into a biker bar parking lot around midnight to buy Benzedrine pills to stay awake for the long drive ahead.

Through flashbacks and the police reading of his record, it's revealed that Kowalski is a Medal of Honor Vietnam War veteran, former race car driver, and motorcycle racer.

After he blows a tire on a dry lake bed and becomes lost, Kowalski is helped by an old prospector who catches rattlesnakes for a Pentecostal Christian commune.

There, he picks up two homosexual hitchhikers stranded en route to San Francisco with a "Just Married" sign in their rear window.

Saturday afternoon, a vengeful off-duty highway patrolman and a group of thugs break into the KOW studio and assault Super Soul.

He calls Jake from a payphone to reassure him that he still intends to deliver the car on Monday, while acknowledging he won't win their bet, and offering to double it for the next time.

[6] The screenplay for Vanishing Point was written by G. Cabrera Infante, a Cuban living in England, under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain.

[7] His script reflected the popular counterculture lifestyle of the time, containing elements of rebellion, drugs, sexual freedom, and rock and roll.

[8] In 1969, director Richard C. Sarafian turned down an offer to make Robert Redford's Downhill Racer in order to direct Vanishing Point.

[7] Originally, the director wanted Gene Hackman to play Kowalski, but 20th Century Fox studio executive Richard Zanuck insisted on casting relative unknown actor Barry Newman in the lead role.

[11] Stunt Coordinator Carey Loftin said he requested the Dodge Challenger because of the "quality of the torsion bar suspension and for its horsepower" and felt that it was "a real sturdy, good running car.

"[12] Five Alpine White Dodge Challenger R/Ts were lent to the production by Chrysler for promotional consideration and were returned upon completion of filming.

[15] The shoot had a few mishaps, including Newman driving a Challenger equipped with three cameras into the bushes in order to avoid a head-on collision when a "civilian" driver ignored the traffic blocks installed to ensure the safety of the crew.

The cars were traveling at approximately 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) so that when projected at normal frame rate, they appeared to be moving much faster.

[citation needed] Loftin's resume at the time included work on Grand Prix (1966), Bullitt (1968), and The French Connection (1971).

The August 2006 issue of Motor Trend magazine has a sidebar with Newman, in which he explains that Kowalski sees the light glinting from between the two bulldozers.

[12][18] Sarafian wanted to score the majority of the film from an album called Motel Shot by Delaney, Bonnie & Friends.

[14] Lionel Newman, head of Fox's music department at the time, denied Sarafian's request because the studio did not want to spend a substantial amount of money obtaining rights to the tracks.

[21] Larry Cohen, in the Reporter criticized the film for being "calculated, tedious and in desperate need of tightening, the picture, produced by Norman Spencer, is uninvolving and devoid of a cohesiveness that might have made it work".

[22] On the other hand, music journalist and essayist Robert Christgau included Vanishing Point on his list of the year's best films at number four.

While conceding the characterization to be "tacky", he said the "whole virtue" of this "mostly ignored B-movie" is "visual rather than romantic", while recommending viewers see the movie under the influence of cannabis.

[12] However, it was a critical and commercial success in the UK and Europe which prompted the studio to re-release it in the United States on a double bill with The French Connection.

Super Soul's "last American hero" speech was also incorporated into the lyrics of the Guns N' Roses song "Breakdown", from their album Use Your Illusion II (1991).

[34] The film was the basis for Audioslave's music video "Show Me How to Live" (2003), directed by the AV Club and which included members of the band in the 1970 Challenger traveling across the desert, following the plot of the movie.

[citation needed] In the November 10, 2021, episode of Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Bruce Springsteen named Vanishing Point as his favorite action film.

[35] The video game Grid 2 (2013) features a trophy/achievement called Vanishing Point, with the description reading "You've won a race in a white Dodge Challenger but lived to tell the tale, unlike Kowalski.

Kowalski is rewritten as a suspected militia sympathizer from Idaho, and Jason Priestley as "The Voice", a white libertarian talk radio shock jock who replaces Super Soul.

The sequence of events in the two films is vaguely similar, but the remake removed all of the original's mystical, existential elements,[19] replacing them with a religious motivation for Kowalski's actions.