Fuel Road Trip Dreams with AMERICAN ROAD

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

This issue of American Road celebrates movies and the way they shape our vacations. It’s a commemorative edition that begins by assembling a proper filmography for any highway connoisseur. “American Road’s Road Film Favorites” contemplates such classics as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). It reappraises such sleepers as Luis Buñuel’s La Voie Lactée (1969) and Jacques Tati’s Traffic (1971). It remembers what the modern road film owes to the early acts of Georges Méliès and Laurel and Hardy.

Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock never made a highway movie. But he knew how to drive a scream up our spines. We head to Bodega Bay, California, where his avian thriller The Birds was produced in 1963 to see if its locations still give our nerves a flutter. Then we scoot over to Kansas and Missouri and follow a folksy road home: We trace the route Peter Bogdanovich forged in the autumn of 1972 when he made the Depression-era, dad-and-daughter, can-do charmer Paper Moon (1973).

Charlie Chaplin is recognized the world over as the supreme comic artist of the twentieth century. Nearly one hundred years ago, he built the Montecito Inn of Santa Barbara, California, with his friend and fellow filmmaker Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. We lace up our slapshoes and waddle around the lobby, then levitate darkly to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, to float up The Exorcist steps. If that doesn’t spin your head around, try riding the Inyo with Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx. We explain how the boys took the West apart in “Marx Bros. on a Train.”

Grab your suitcase and go make some vacation movie magic of your own!