Movies - The Sugarland Express

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Sugarland Express

	Movies - The Sugarland Express

The Sugarland Express is a 1974 feature film starring Goldie Hawn and William Atherton. The movie partially takes place and was partially filmed in Sugar Land, Texas. It is the second feature length film directed by Steven Spielberg. It is about a husband and wife trying to outrun the law and was based on a true story.

Background

In 1969, Ila Fae Dent helped her husband Robert escape from a Texas pre-release prison facility (the same one where the movie was filmed), because she feared losing custody of their child to Ila Fae's mother. During their flight, they overpowered and kidnapped Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Kenneth Crone, holding him hostage during a slow-moving caravan of up to 150 DPS vehicles, along with media in cars and helicopters and hundreds of curious bystanders, that passed through Port Arthur, Houston, Navasota, and finally Wheelock, near Bryan. Unlike the film, the events took just several hours.

At Ila Fae's mother's house, they encountered numerous officers including an FBI agent. The situation grew tense, with Crone held at gunpoint. The FBI agent and county sheriff shot and killed Robert. The trooper was uninjured. Ila Fae spent five months in prison. She died in 1992. Crone was an advisor on the film and had a small role as a deputy sheriff.

Film Promotion

The promotors of the film played up the grassroots support that existed for a mother trying to claim custody of her child. Some posters used the tagline:

A girl with a great following
Every cop in the state was after her.
Everybody else was behind her.

For the DVD release, the first line was dropped.

Trivia

The pre-release facility is located in the Jester III Unit of the Texas Deparment of Criminal Justice - Institutional Division, in Fort Bend County, Texas, northwest of Sugar Land.
Every Spielberg film from this one on has been scored by John Williams, except The Color Purple
.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Sugarland Express ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Sugarland Express; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay