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Rating: 
Summary: One For The Road
Review: Among the features of this entertaining and provocative study, I like the fine discriminations: "REPO MAN, we should clarify at the outset, is not really a road movie. It belongs to the non- or semi-road movie tradition of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, TAXI DRIVER, and SPEED." These are movies, he tells us, in which the characters drive all the time, but "within city limits." To qualify as a real road movie you have to go somewhere. The genre began in earnest in the late 1960s, sort of as a cinematic aftershoot of the epochal road novels of the 1950s, including Kerouac's ON THE ROAD which itself oddly has never been filmed. However, you can find precursors to the road movie in the American cinema of the 1950s, 40s, 30s, and even earlier, because it seems as soon as people started hitting Route 66, filmmakers had the idea to restage the old quest legends, or pilgrimage stories, in a Model T or a Thunderbird.
Laderman points out it is not strictly an American genre and there are plenty of road movies from other continents--look at Mel Gibson in THE ROAD WARRIOR for example, or even something like WEEKEND by Jean-Luc Godard, in which most of the characters get stuck in a mammoth traffic jam--quel ennui! Laderman links the road movie to a variety of sources such as the picaresque novel of Defoe or Cervantes, the novel of social realism (think of THE GRAPES OF WRATH and how it moves slowly across a vast, devastated and dusty America), or the visions of Europeans coming to America and seeing it as one big highway--Nabokov with LOLITA, Antonioni with the bizarre and underrated ZABRISKIE POINT. In between he treats everything from EASY RIDER to DETOUR, BADLANDS to SUGARLAND EXPRESS. Gay and indie cinema are not neglected either so expect plenty on MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO and STRANGER THAN PARADISE. I wouldn't drive and read this book at the same time, but outside of that, ready, set, go!
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