Tracks
Screening on Film
Directed by Henry Jaglom.
With Dennis Hopper, Taryn Power, Dean Stockwell.
US, 1976, 35mm, color, 92 min.
With Dennis Hopper, Taryn Power, Dean Stockwell.
US, 1976, 35mm, color, 92 min.
A key work in the American independent feature movement of the 1970s, Tracks is set on an eastbound train carrying the remains of an American soldier killed in Vietnam and the nearly deranged army sergeant (Hopper) who has been assigned to escort the coffin. On board, the sergeant encounters a microcosm of an America that has all but forgotten the war: a college coed en route to a vacation on the Cape, assorted hipsters and schmoozers hanging out in the smoking car, and an older woman who briefly comforts him. As critic J. Hoberman once noted, “Visceral and discomforting, Henry Jaglom’s ambitious independent production is both a terminal road film and the first post-Vietnam movie.”