Characteristically American genre synthesizing the road (the automobile or motorcycle) and a person’s individual quest for meaning and improvement. The road movie has a long heritage in American literary quests (Huckleberry Finn, Travels With Charley, On the Road). It also has been adapted into other national cinemas in France, Australia, Germany and Finland, while remaining deeply American.

While the postwar road movie shows special affinities with the western, we must recognize other important filmic roots. These include the moving albeit comic quests of Chaplin, Keaton and Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Frank Capra also used road elements effectively in the comic It Happened One Nïght (1934) and in a more somber vein in Meet John Doe (1941). The presence of comic and tragic elements continues to challenge the boundaries of any genre classification.

In the postwar period, certain key movies demarcate complex changes in spectatorship and meaning generation by generation. In the 1950s, for example, the road movie allows the rebellion of Brando in the Wild One (1954). The 1960s extended this rebellion in the nihilistic crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Easy Rider (1969), whose motorcycle pilgrimage and violent denouement underscored the tensions of the decade.

After a spate of comedies (e.g. Smokey and the Bandit, 1977) and interesting foreign perspectives like Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), more reflexive road movies returned with David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1989). In the 1990s, this new take allowed the genre to rethink masculinity, whether through the female liberty underpinning Thelma and Louise (1991) or the gay/hustler explorations of My Own Private Idaho (1991).