4. Easy Rider
Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are two free-wheeling drifters who, having picked up a pair of prostitutes (played by Karen Black and Toni Basil), slip away from the Mardi Gras festivities and stumble into the St Louis cemetery. And it is here that they decide to drop acid. What follows is a babel of prayer and panic, an intoxicating mix of quick edits, uncomfortable close-ups and overlapping dialogue. Five minutes of moaning, manic laughter and a constant metallic clanging; four people freaking out through a fisheye lens. It's certainly surreal, not least the sight of Wyatt sneaking up behind a stern-looking man in a suit. The drug seems to have had a particularly adverse effect on the women, who have stripped naked, hidden themselves in the gaps between the crypts and begun to sob uncontrollably. Billy looks on, helpless, while Wyatt has crawled into the 'arms' of a marble Madonna and asked her why she had left him. It was Hopper's suggestion that Fonda speak to the statue as though it were his mother (who had committed suicide when he was 10 years old); an idea that was initially met with some reluctance. Yet he ultimately agreed, making the contradictory (by turns confused and confrontational) cry for help all the more poignant.