Filmed in Los Angeles and Death Valley, and set to the music of Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, the Stones, and others, Antonioni's portrait of the U.S. as a battleground for the war between radical and straight cultures met with mixed reactions on its release: accusations of “simple-mindedness” came from Americans for whom, by 1970, the theme was a tired one. Philip Strick, however, comments in Monthly Film Bulletin on Zabriskie Point as a foreigner's and, above all, Antonioni's, angle on America: “What matters is the emotive response to colours, sounds, actions, atmosphere; all else is shrouded in mystery, purposeless, haphazard, and immaterial.... Every foreign filmmaker seems to have brought back identical American images of ludicrous billboards and jumbled traffic signs, yet Zabriskie Point contemplates them again with an almost guileless, and certainly infectious, delight.” Mark Frechette stars as a student who escapes the scene of a riot and takes off in a stolen airplane for the desert, where he meets up with free-wheeling drifter Daria Halprin.