Event

IN SEARCH OF AMERICA

Dir. Paul Bogart, 1971
USA, 75 minutes
English

College dropout Mike Olsen (Jeff Bridges, mere months away from the Last Picture Show and Fat City would cement his status as one of the greatest actors of his generation), a college dropout, convinces his family to pack up a refurbished Greyhound bus and go off in search of what's "going down" in the "real America" (apparently Mike also dropped out of Easy Rider before seeing the last scene). They don't make it very far, but, hey, who does?

Originally made for TV, In Search of America has a fantastic cast including Bridges, Vera Miles (The Searchers, plus the Wrong Man and Psycho with Hitchcock), Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire, Planet of the Apes), Sal Mineo (Rebel Without a Cause and later Escape from the Planet of the Apes with Kim Hunter), Tyne Daly (who went from this to the Susan Sontag scripted Play It As It Lays to the Dirty Harry sequel the Enforcer to a long stint as Lacey on TV's Cagney & Lacey), Gylnn Turman (later in Cooley High and Bergman's The Serpent's Egg, then on A Different World and The Wire) and Tom Baker (of Warhol's "I, A Man").
Director Paul Bogart was a TV stalwart who made a number of interesting films including the post-noir Marlowe (with James Gardner as Raymond Chandlers titular detective), the socially conscious race drama Hall of Anger (with Bridges and Calvin Lockhart), and the inexplicably popular religious comedy Oh God,You Devil, starring Bob Denver and George Burns.
Screenwriter Lewis John Carlino seemed to specialize in post hippie bummers- his other credits include Frankenheimer's Seconds, The Mechanic (possibly the best Charles Bronson film) and the relentlessly downbeat 1970s adaptation of Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea.