Caught in that particularly Spielbergian vortex of spectacle, "aw-shucks" comedy and domestic family drama. The formula usually goes down fairly well, but what makes this one a little harder to swallow is its naïve and overly reverential view of law enforcement as well as its portrayal of Lou Jean Poplin as a dumb Texas 'gal' with the stock hysterical scream, vanity, vapidity and delusions about how the world works. Not sure I've ever watched any anti-adoption movie before, let alone one this angry about the very concept. Saying that, if Spielberg had seen a psychoanalyst about his parental issues in the early 1970s we wouldn't have Jurassic Park, I guess.
In casting a wider net both conceptually and narratively, the director went smaller, and in so doing missed out on that mythic grandeur that typified both Duel and his next film, Jaws (1975). The Sugarland Express was and remains uncomfortably wedged in between those lean-and-mean, stripped-down fables: in the former it’s a truck, the latter a shark, but they’re essentially similar tales of domesticated man battling the elements in unforgiving wide-open landscape—each is a big, growling machine of a movie. In Sugarland, on the other hand, the main character is female (he wouldn’t have another until 1985’s The Color Purple, and arguably none after that).[…]
Even as a portrait of maternal instinct, the film is curiously dispassionate (which might come as a surprise to some in retrospect, since Spielberg would become so fixated on tales revolving around the restoration of the family unit).
[…]
A general air of pageantry hangs over the film, perhaps an unintentional side effect of a Cincinnati-born, California-raised director overseeing a cast of Yankees doing their best Texan drawls: Hawn is from D.C., Atherton from Connecticut, and Sacks from New York; only Ben Johnson, predictably, emerges unscathed, his very presence supplying the sort of iconicity the rest of Sugarland lacks. [One] reason that the two other concurrent “romantic outlaw” films of the same period, Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, are so much more effective is that their filmmakers allow their protagonists to assume a mythic power, the dilution of which then instills them with a certain poetry.
— Michael Koresky (Reverse Shot)
[Spielberg] could be that rarity among directors—a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation’s Howard Hawks.
— Pauline Kael (1974)
Synopsis: Married small-time crooks Lou-Jean and Clovis Poplin lose their baby to the state of Texas and resolve to do whatever it takes to get him back. Lou-Jean gets Clovis out of jail, and the two steal their son from his foster home, in addition to taking a highway patrolman hostage. As a massive dragnet starts to pursue them across Texas, the couple become unlikely folk heroes and even start to bond with the captive policeman.