Hollywood screenwriter Buck Henry once described Easy Rider as the “automatic handwriting of the counterculture”, by which he meant the movie didn’t come out of a clear blue sky. The spirit of the times was turbulent, volcanic, revolutionary. In the previous two years, there had been a student uprising in Paris, the killing of Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, racist murders in Birmingham, Alabama (and all over the US), the Prague spring and the Soviet tanks, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. And in Hollywood, executives were panicking about the dull fare being pumped out and the increasing importance of the youth customer base. The vitality of the New American Cinema showed them a new type of American movie was possible-Billy and Captain America were like a counterculture Bonnie And Clyde, runaway road-movie outlaws only they didn’t have guns.

Ethically made in Portugal