Dakota (1974) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 16, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Wim VerstappenRelease Date(s)
1974 (September 16, 2025)Studio(s)
Scorpio Films/Actueel Film (Cult Epics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: B-
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Wim Verstappen’s 1974 film Dakota might be one of the greatest existential road movies ever made, if not for the minor detail that it doesn’t actually involve cars or roads. Instead, the story revolves around a Douglas PH-MAG DC-3 Dakota, owned and operated by Dutch pilot Dick de Boer (Kees Brusse). Yet in terms of tone, mood, and style, it bears as much of a resemblance to Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop as it does to any other film about airplanes. The fascinating thing about Dakota is that it didn’t turn out anything like what Verstappen had originally intended it to be. As productions go, it was the Apocalypse Now of airplane movies (or road movies, for that matter). Behind-the-scenes chaos resulted in the script being significantly rewritten, the film reshaped, and the final results being something completely different than what Verstappen set out to make. Yet necessity can be the mother of invention, and as a result, Dakota is a far richer film than what he first had in mind.
Verstappen had long been a fan of aviation, and he initially conceived of Dakota as being a high-flying adventure story with crime thriller elements, but it started to evolve before filming was even underway. Pim de la Parra, who was Verstappen’s partner at their production company Scorpio Films, purchased a used DC-3 that served as transportation for the cast and crew as well as the primary production vehicle; and as the story developed, it became as much about that plane as about anything else. Yet there was still a love story involved between de Boer and a femme fatale named Claudia (Monique van de Ven). De Boer works out of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, where he’s so obsessed with flying that he’ll do anything to make enough money keep his vintage Dakota in the air, including smuggling. When Claudia offers to hire his plane, he’s skeptical why she’s willing to pay so much for doing so little. But his fortunes take a turn for the worse, so he’s forced to accept her offer against his best judgment and make a desperate journey with her, carrying her mysterious cargo all the way back to Ameland in the Netherlands.
Or at least, that’s how Dakota was supposed to unfold. But van de Ven was fresh off her successful debut in Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight, where she had begun a relationship with cinematographer Jan de Bont. Verstappen also hired de Bont to lens Dakota, and that’s where the troubles started. Verstappen didn’t see eye-to-eye with de Bont, due in no small measure to the fact that the cinematographer only had eyes for van de Ven, and Verstappen ended up firing him in short order. He was replaced by Theo van Sande, but the situation resulted in van de Ven leaving the production as well, before all of her scenes were completed. That created a quandary, because enough of Dakota was already in the can that it was too late to replace her, but there wasn’t enough footage of her to complete the film as intended. So, she was written out of the story and the script was significantly reshaped. (The final screenplay is credited to Charles Gormley, Wim Verstappen, Jan Verstappen, and Harrie Verstappen, but others had a hand in trying to make sense out of it.)
It’s arguable that van de Ven’s exit actually benefited the film, because as wonderful an actress as she can be, Dakota is ultimately the love story between a man and his airplane. Verstappen ended up demonstrating attention to every possible detail about flying an airplane like the DC-3 while remaining highly elliptical about the rest of the narrative. The exact nature of Claudia’s troubles is never explained, and while de Boer does eventually discover what kind of cargo that he’s been transporting on her behalf, the reveal raises more questions than it answers. Even her disappearance from the story is never fully explained aside from a few perfunctory lines of dialogue between de Boer and his friend Helen (Diana Dobbelman). But it means that instead of being a story about a man, a woman and a plane, Dakota is about one man and his plane against the rest of the world. De Boer doesn’t have any patience for women in the cockpit anyway, as he explains to Claudia early in the film:
“A plane is a male thing. Landing your bird in a field, a control stick between your legs.”
Well, there’s no need for metaphor when you spell it out openly in the dialogue. Claudia’s unceremonious exit from the story means that de Boer has to make the long flight from Curaçao to Ameland by himself, and as a result, Dakota ends up being a masturbatory experience of one man handling his stick solo. The DC-3 lacks the range to make a flight of that nature, so de Boer makes one 8-hour leg to Suriname in order to pick up a load of 50-gallon drums of fuel, and then makes the rest of the 33-hour trip to Ameland by refueling the plane in the air, taking naps as he can while on autopilot. It’s during this remarkable sequence that Dakota transcends being a mere film about aviation and instead become a piece of existential poetry. (That feeling is supported by Antoine Duhamel’s eerily discordant score, which does much of the heavy lifting in terms of providing atmosphere.)
Yet however explicitly that Verstappen may have spelled out his main theme, there’s still a metaphorical element to Dakota in the way that story inadvertently mirrored some of what was happening behind-the-scenes. Verstappen and de la Parra had formed Scorpio Films together back in 1965, but they were starting to go their own ways by 1974, and the chaotic production of Dakota ended up dissolving their partnership once and for all. Verstappen would go it solo for the rest of his career, making Dakota a personal film for him on multiple levels. Critics were baffled by it back in 1974 and it failed to find an audience, but like many other existential road movies (Two-Lane Blacktop included), time has been kind and it has now become something of a cult classic—well, at least in the Netherlands, anyway. Dakota still hasn’t gained the international recognition that it deserves, but hopefully that changes someday. There’s a lot more to Dutch cinema than just Paul Verhoeven, and while Verstappen never made any film in the west like Verhoeven has, he’s still worthy of retrospective recognition.
Cinematographers Jan de Bont and Theo van de Sande (among uncredited others) shot Dakota on 35mm film in 2-perf Techniscope using spherical lenses. The resulting flat negative was blown up optically for anamorphic release prints that were framed at 2.35:1. There’s no information regarding the master used for this release, but it’s definitely an aging one and the source looks like a print, with all the issues that entails: limited contrast, murky blacks, and blown-out highlights. There’s a fair amount of damage on display, from light speckling to significant tears in a few frames, and the elliptical changeover marks are visible. There’s also some flickering and density fluctuations, and the encode suffers from some macroblocking in a few of the night shots. Does that mean that this is an unwatchable version of Dakota? Hardly. It’s just the realities of the only available source and the lack of resources to do any kind of digital restoration work to it. It still looks like film, with balanced color reproduction, reasonably natural-looking flesh tones, and grain that’s been softened somewhat but is still visible. Watching it in digital projection feels like watching a projected film print, and that’s good enough.
Audio is offered in Dutch 2.0 mono LPCM and 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with removable English subtitles. While the audio was doubtless sourced from the optical tracks on the print, it’s never distractingly noisy or distorted (although there is some background noise audible at times). There aren’t any major artifacts like pops or clicks, and while it’s a little compressed overall due to the limitations of the dynamic range on the optical tracks, the wonderfully moody score by Antoine Duhamel still works its magic. (Note that there are a couple of lines of dialogue that aren’t translated in the subtitles, but I can’t determine if that’s intentional or not.)
The Cult Epics Blu-ray release of Dakota includes a reversible insert with new artwork by Juan Esteban R. on one side and the original theatrical poster artwork on the other, as well as a slipcover with the new artwork. (Note that Cult Epics is also offering a version with a 12”x18” foldout poster on their webstore.) The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
- Audio Commentary by Peter Verstraten
- Dakota Press Flight (19:14)
- Cannes Film Festival (8:16)
- Photo Gallery (38 in all)
- Scorpio Films Trailers:
- Dakota (2:43)
- Wan Pipel (3:30)
- Frank & Eva (2:23)
- My Nights with Susan, Sandra, Olga & Julie (2:03)
- Obsessions (2:55)
- Blue Movie (1:52)
- Pastorale 1943 (2:01)
The commentary features Leiden University lecturer Peter Verstraten, author of Dutch Post-war Fiction Films Through a Lens of Psycho-Analysis, and he’s the perfect choice to bring explain all the minutiae regarding Dakota to western audiences who may be unfamiliar with the Dutch film industry. Verstraten provides the background of how Verstappen became a filmmaker and details the history of Scorpio Films before delving into the troubled production of Dakota, from the behind-the-scenes shenanigans to how the script had to be rewritten in order to account for them. Along the way, he offers information about the Dakota DC-3, the cast, and the crew, including the soap opera saga of what happened with Monique van de Ven and Jan de Bont. It’s an invaluable track for learning more about Dakota, especially since English-language information about it can be a bit limited.
In addition to a collection of trailers for other titles produced by Scorpio Films, Cult Epics has also included two different sets of vintage archival footage. The Dakota Press Flight is a reel from a press junket that took place on the production’s DC-3, which ended up being a bit more of an adventure than anyone had in mind when there were issues with the magnetos on one of the plane’s engines. (And the reel itself has more than anyone bargained for since it contains a few brief non sequitur inserts from an adult film.) The Cannes Film Festival is footage from the 1978 festival, which Verstappen attended despite the fact that they didn’t accept his film Pastorale 1953 that year. Monique van de Ven was also there, and it’s clear that the bad blood between the two of them hadn’t softened at all since 1974.
It’s an interesting slate of extras, and while a fresh scan from better elements would have been nice, it’s still impressive that we’re getting a Region A Blu-ray release of Dakota in any form. Props to Cult Epics for putting together such a nice package for a film that won’t be familiar to most audiences outside of the Netherlands, but it’s still worthy of rediscovery. It’s a highly recommended release, warts and all.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).