Скачать или смотреть Tribute to the Nike Sky Force Hi worn by C. Thomas Howell in “The Hitcher”, 1986

This is another of my tribute videos to sneakers worn by cute guys in movies. This was a really influential one for me when I first saw it on VHS rental tape on my 14 inch portable colour TV in my bedroom in the late 80s.

The movie is a superb psychological mystery suspense horror road movie in the tradition of “The Wages of Fear”, and of course Spielberg’s “Duel”. Like another of my favourites in a similar vein, “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2”, this one flirts with the “cute guy in distress” gay subtext variant of the horror movie, with vulnerable sensitive boyish young guys wearing hot sneakers. Here, C. Thomas Howell is menaced and toyed with by Rutger Hauer in a cat-and-mouse chase through the beautifully photographed vast California (passing for Texas) desert. Howell’s character, Jim Halsey, wears two pairs of Nikes during the movie, the second of which is the pair shown here. From the moment he changes into them in the bathroom of a cafe about a third of the way into the movie, discarding his ruined gasoline-soaked Nike runners, these basketball sneakers never seem to come off his feet! They see a lot of action, including scrambling and running through the hot desert, pedal-pumping close-ups, lace-tying, getting trapped momentarily in a car door, and getting generally beat up. He even wears them relaxing on a motel bed!

On my old small TV screen back in the day, I had no chance of making out exactly what these shoes were, and sneakers like these weren’t available in the place I lived in any case. But I could see them enough in this movie to get me extremely interested! Now in glorious HD, they are revealed clearly as one of Nike’s iconic mid-80s basketball shoes, now very rare, the Sky Force Hi, preserved in celluloid forever. Here, I show almost all the scenes in which the sneakers feature, then revisit key shots to linger on them in closer (and sometimes slower) detail.

I urge everyone to watch this great movie if you haven’t seen it!