Dennis Hopper’s Lost Vietnam Drama Gets a 4K Resurrection

A Vietnam vet escorts his dead comrade’s body across America by train, slipping between memory and madness as the country around him tries to look away.

That’s the setup for TRACKS, Henry Jaglom’s 1976 post-war head trip starring Dennis Hopper, and it’s finally getting the treatment it deserves. A new 4K restoration is screening at New York’s Roxy Cinema on November 11 and 22.

Jaglom shot TRACKS in that raw, fractured style that defined the New Hollywood mavericks. Hopper plays the sergeant haunted by what he saw overseas. Dean Stockwell and Taryn Power (Tyrone’s daughter, in one of her first roles) drift in and out of his reality as the train rolls on. J. Hoberman called it “visceral and discomforting,” both a road movie and the first real post-Vietnam film. Variety said it was “incisive, revelatory.”

The film screened at Cannes in 1976, then got buried. Jaglom, who got his start editing Easy Rider with Jack Nicholson, spent decades carving out his own weird corner of American indie cinema. Hope Runs High is bringing this one back.

For anyone tracking the unsung films of the ’70s, this restoration matters. TRACKS captures a moment when America couldn’t process what it had done, told by a filmmaker who refused to play it safe.

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