ROAD MOVIES/Michael Dwyer: Motors and movies . . . both are inescapably of the 20th century, but it's difficult to say which is more quintessentially American. Our film critic looks over the place of the car in Hollywood - and the cinema of other nations.
Get your motor running
Get out on the highway
Looking for adventure
And whatever comes our way
It's conceivable that these opening lines from Steppenwolf's Born To be Wild could feature on the soundtrack of any number of road movies. However, they come from one of the defining films of the genre - the 1969 Easy Rider, one of the biggest surprise hits in the history of cinema, and one of the most influential.
"Two men went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere" was the nihilistic slogan for this episodic road movie of two bikers, Captain America (Peter Fonda) and his sidekick, Billy (Dennis Hopper) travelling through the southern states of America on their Harleys for an odyssey of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
Produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper, it was made on a tiny budget and, despite the bleakness of its uncompromising ending, it struck a chord all over the world, making it one of the Zeitgeist movies of the era.
It made a star of Jack Nicholson, the B-movie actor who earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of an alcoholic civil rights lawyer who loosens up when he takes to the road with Captain America and Billy.
As is de rigueur for the road movie genre, Easy Rider was about a journey of self-discovery for its principal characters. Even if they couldn't find America anywhere, they might find themselves, man.
Such was the case with hundreds of road movies which preceded it, and with hundreds more which followed it. One of the laws that govern film production, especially in Hollywood, is that success repeats itself, even though this is, in fact, a misconception that has proved costly for many a producer. Nevertheless, every time a genre movie scores at the box-office, the irresistible temptation for the studios is to try to replicate its success.
The road movie formula is one of the simplest of genres. It generally works like this: take two diverse personalities - ideally an alienated loner and an extrovert with a latent sensitive side - and throw them together through a linking device that will take them out on to the road. Their journey will, of necessity, be eventful, bringing them into contact with a variety of different characters, at least a few of whom must be oddball for comic relief.
Add some frissons of danger to the mix - usually in the form of an oppressive authority figure such as a redneck policeman or a corrupt politician. Put them through an emotional mill and have them come out the other end as wiser, better people - if they survive, that is.
It's crucial to hire the best cinematographer the production can afford, to capture the beauty of the landscape through which the protagonists travel. And post-Easy Rider, the movie should feature enough rock music to pad out a soundtrack album that will serve as a bonus money-spinner.
The road movie is an ideal genre for a young director to demonstrate expertise. The classic example is Steven Spielberg who, at the age of 24, made his accomplished feature film debut with Duel, and followed it three years later with Sugarland Express, a powerful and moving cross-country chase with police on the trail of a minor criminal (Goldie Hawn) and her husband (William Atherton) whom she breaks out of a Texan jail. Impulsively stealing a car, they drive towards Sugarland to find their baby, who has been given to a foster family.
THE success of Duel spawned a number of movies in which the hero is threatened by an intimidating trucker - most recently, the spare and gripping Breakdown (1997), starring Kurt Russell, Kathleen Quinlan and the late JT Walsh, and the jokey, neatly plotted Roadkill (2001) in which Paul Walker (fresh from racing cars in the virtually plotless hit, The Fast and the Furious) and Steve Zahn play brothers who tease a mean, humourless trucker. Big mistake.
A distinguished exception in which the trucker was the hero is Henri-Georges Clouzot's unbearably tense 1953 French thriller, The Wages of Fear, in which Yves Montand leads a group of penniless South American men who accept the challenge of transporting truckloads of nitroglycerine across 300 miles of hazardous mountain roads.
Cinema continues to produce variations on the road movie genre - from Jan de Bont's clever use of a bus wired with a bomb in the stylish Speed (1994) to David Lynch's touching The Straight Story (1999), in which an elderly man travelled cross-country by lawnmower on a journey of reconciliation with his brother, to Alexander Payne's witty and unsentimental About Schmidt, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Based on a Louis Begley story, Payne's film compassionately observes Warren Schmidt, a recently retired and widowed man who begins to re-evaluate everything about his life as he travels in his winnebago from Omaha to Denver for his daughter's wedding. He is played in a sublime performance by Jack Nicholson, which deserves to win him his fourth Oscar next spring, 33 years after he received his first nomination for Easy Rider.