On the night that I saw "Easy Rider," way back in early 1970, I nearly ran my car into a telephone pole.

I was with my brother, which is why I only "nearly" hit the pole. If he hadn't been there, I might have taken out a whole row of poles, used-car lots and apartment complexes. I was that angry.

I'll give Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper this much: Their movie caused me to coin a phrase. Anytime a movie ends in violence, I call it "an  Easy Rider ending." I don't mean it as a compliment.

This isn't to say that "Easy Rider" doesn't have its qualities. It was revolutionary for its time. It turned Jack Nicholson into a star. It's grossed more than $60 million from a $360,000 production budget.

But ... there's that ending.

You'll be able to judge for yourself, again if you've already seen it, when it celebrates it 50th anniversary by screening three times: at 4 p.m. on Sunday at 4 and 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 17th, at the Regal Cinemas theater at Northtown Mall.

 If you're questioning whether you ought to go, here are some critical comments to help you decide:

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: "It plays today more as a period piece than as living cinema, but it captures so surely the tone and look of that moment in time."

Vincent Canby, New York Times: "Hopper, Fonda and their friends went out into America looking for a movie and found instead a small, pious statement (upper case) about our society (upper case), which is sick (upper case). It's pretty but lower case cinema."

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader: "The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir -- particularly in its narcissism and fatalism -- of how the hippie movement thought of itself."

(Quick note about Vincent Canby: He was a conservative critic, one who sometimes had a difficult time handling how radically cinema changed in the 1970s. But that doesn't mean that he was always wrong.)

Just be careful how you drive when leaving the theater.