Two vagabonds chance to meet while hitchhiking on an abandoned road somewhere in California. At first the elder guy, Max, doesn’t want anything to do with the younger, Lion. It takes a broken lighter to convince the untrusting loner – his teeth clenching an unlit cigar – that the trip might be easier with someone else along. Although temperamentally different, the two wanderers are united in their desire to change their lives and thereby drive away the shadows of the past. Max did six years for assault and now he’s on his way to Pittsburgh to open a car wash. Lion spent five years at sea, having abandoned his pregnant girlfriend in Detroit; he’s carrying a wrapped box containing a children’s lamp and he’d like to pick the relationship up where things left off.… In his simple tragicomedy, Jerry Schatzberg sensitively worked the synergy of two New Hollywood superstars – 43-year-old Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, a decade his junior. They provide a compelling spark above all to the partially improvised scenes in which their outsider characters attempt to make contact with a society that doesn’t give a damn about them.… The movie, which took the 1973 Grand Prix at Cannes, is one of a number of motion pictures that the new writer-director generation adopted as the narrative model of the road movie (see also Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People or Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces). And veteran Vilmos Zsigmond’s excellent camerawork is another highlight of a classically told tale of simple dreams doomed to failure.