Hollywood is still trying to figure out how to bring On The Road to a screen near you, according to Entertainment Weekly (my favorite magazine), though it's hard to see how they could bring the largely internal novel by Jack Kerouac to life.
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| Thelma & Louise (1991) |
But you sort of expect LA to take a whack at the classic book, since movies about road trips across North America are a staple of the silver screen. In no particular order, here a bunch of the films that I have enjoyed over the years.
-The most famous road trip movies of recent times were Thelma and Louise and Rain Man. These have become iconic films of course and are worth watching again, but particularly the film about two women (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) on the run from their boring lives.
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| It Happened One Night (1934) |
-There are three classic American road trip films, and all deserve their reputations.
Frank Capra's It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is still funny and entertaining 71 years after it was made, as it follows the efforts of a reporter secretly following a socialite who's run away from home.
Sullivan's Travels from 1941 hasn't aged as well at It Happened One Night, though the Preston Sturges story about a director who goes on the road to see how America's coping after the Great Depression is still worth watching.
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| The Grapes of Wrath (1940) |
On a more serious note, there's John Ford's Grapes of Wrath from the John Steinbeck novella of the same name, following a farming family from the dust bowl east to evergreen California. The 1940 film with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad still rings a deep emotional bell.
-Steinbeck is also responsible for Travels With Charley, a 1962 book about his drive around America with a poodle (that would be Charley) in a pickup named after Don Quixote's horse (Rocinante). A TV movie was made of this book and I recall it with great affection, but I haven't seen it in years and I can now find no record of it. Should it ever turn up on a TV near you, however, I recommend it (and the book) highly.
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| Citizen's Band (1977) |
-Handle With Care (aka Citizen's Band) from 1977 depends greatly on the popularity of CB radios for its existence, but it's better than you might expect thanks to director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and a cast headed by the wonderful Paul Le Mat and Candy Clark, who met some years before in one of the best car movies (though it's not a road trip film, exactly) ever made, American Graffiti.
