Road Movies

FROM CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD TO COUNTERCULTURE

The road movie emerged as a distinct genre near the end of the 1960s, as baby boomers began hitting the road. It was during the Depression, however, that certain classical genre films developed elements of the modern road movie. While numerous early gangster films used dramatic driving sequences, the related social-conscience film sometimes incorporated mobility as part of its more pointed political critique. Wild Boys of the Road (1933), for example, exposes the social decay caused by the Depression by following the trials of homeless children riding the rails. Other notable films in this vein are I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), You Only Live Once (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Screwball comedies often employ a travel motif to present the divisive but amusing antics of the lead couple. It Happened One Night (1934) integrates road travel into its narrative and theme: despite their differences, the lead couple undergoes an identity change and fall in love as a result of of traveling together. Twentieth Century (1934) and Sullivan's Travels (1942) follow this pattern. With its emphasis on wandering, migration, and the frontier, the western also proves to be a formative, if indirect, influence. While westerns usually portray a time before cars, many road movies allude to cowboy treks through an untamed wilderness, such as Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956).

Another classical genre with more direct influence on the modern road movie is film noir, which codes the road as a menacing threat, a perpetual detour from which one may never escape. Much of the road movie's cynicism (as well as its B-movie, low-budget, on-the-run look) derives from the 1945 classic Detour , where a man's cross-country sojourn to marry his girl gradually spirals into a nightmare of crime and murder. Detour emphasizes the journey as the undoing of the protagonist's very identity, suggested also in Desperate (1947). Like Detour , The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953) establish fear and suspense around hitchhiking; They Live By Night (1948) and Gun Crazy are exemplary of outlaw couple road film noir. The attraction of road film noir lives on in contemporary neo-noir movies like The Hitcher (1986), Delusion (1991), Red Rock West (1992), and Joy Ride (2001).

In the 1950s, a few road comedies appeared, notable for a wholesome conformity antithetical to most road movies: one of the last Bob Hope–Bing Crosby "road to" films, Road to Bali (1952); Vincente Minnelli's The Long, Long Trailer (1954); and the final Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy vehicle, Hollywood or Bust (1956). While 1950s road movies are rather scarce (and flimsy), other literary and cultural developments are crucial to the post-Hollywood birth of the genre as "independent." Accompanying President Eisenhower's burgeoning inter-state highway system was the emerging postwar youth culture portrayed in films like The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Moreover, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Jack Kerouac's On the Road appeared in 1955 and 1957 respectively, two monumental road novels that rip back and forth across America with a subversive erotic charge. This is the era when American mobility took off as middle-class tourism and commuting and also as beatnik wanderlust. By the mid-1960s, with classical Hollywood sputtering out and the counterculture seeking to redefine America, the road movie came into its own.

The genre's critical distance from conformity is intimated by the many hotrod and biker films of the 1950s and 1960s that champion leather-clad bohemian youth rebellion by fetishizing cars and motorcycles. But it is really Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider that launched the modern road movie. Besides being exemplary of the auteur-driven genre revisionism of the New American cinema, both films portray mobility as essential to narrative structure and political commentary, reinventing the spirit of On the Road for young anti-establishment audiences. Using the Depression setting to speak to sixties civil strife, Bonnie and Clyde celebrates the infamous outlaw couple as a sexy, exhilarating antidote to the dead end of small-town America, and capitalist greed generally. But Easy Rider seems the true prototype of the genre, explicitly spelling out the challenge of the counterculture through the road trip. This landmark American independent film uses the journey to affirm an alternative lifestyle and to expose the stifling repression of conservative America. Despite their visionary conception of movement, both films end rather grimly, with the rambling antiheroes gunned down on the road by Southern bigots.

Given the huge success of both films, the early 1970s saw a proliferation of road movies, becoming a golden age for the genre. With the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal looming, many of these road movies expressed post-counterculture disenchantment. Picking up on the cynical tone concluding Easy Rider , films such as Five Easy Pieces (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop and Badlands (1973), and Thieves Like Us (1974) were driven by antiheroes unsure of where or why they are going. Presenting rather incoherent narrative and character motivation, these films yield a more disturbing, "minimalist" journey that nevertheless probes mysterious emotional landscapes. The road movie also inspired the early years of the "film-school generation": Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969), Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974), Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), and George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973).