"You can never go fast enough": The Early 1970s Road Movie as the Quintessential New Hollywood Genre

Although it is a genre that has taken hold in other countries like Australia, the road movie is most keenly associated with American cinema. Taking its cue from the forward momentum of colonialism, conquest and the wandering search for meaning that characterise the western, and the development of the vast network of highways and byways that crisscross the United States with the coming of modernity and the motor car, the road movie can be regarded – along with the western – as the quintessential American genre.

Mixing with comedy, crime, romance and other genres, it took particular hold with the coming of sound. Although often categorised in other ways, such celebrated films as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) can be productively understood as archetypal or formative “road” movies. But it is in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the road movie reached its apogee in the aftershock of the extraordinary popular success of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Hollywood studios’ newfound openness to emerging talent with a very different outlook on cinema and life. The forward momentum of earlier films is hollowed out, as movies like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) reflect the relentless, cyclical but questing motion of burned out, listless yet idealistic figures across a blighted and lost American landscape. In many ways the road movie is the model genre of New Hollywood and the counterculture, and for a few short years it was a dominant expressive force.

This season focuses on the first half of the 1970s and highlights the importance of the road movie form to key emerging filmmakers such as Terrence Malick, Bob Rafelson, Monte Hellman and Steven Spielberg. It also includes singular works like Barbara Loden’s remarkable sole feature, Wanda (1970), and the iconic, genre-defining Vanishing Point (1971).