On November 11, 1926, the Mother Road of the United States was officially born: the road that connected Chicago to Los Angeles was included in the federal highway system with the number 66. A hundred years later, it is still one of the most recognizable symbols of American culture. Here are some of the most significant cinematic stories featuring her, from "Easy Rider" to "Rain Man" and "Cars"
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They call it Mother Road, the Mother Road of the United States. He ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, from the cold of Lake Michigan to the heat of Santa Monica beach. It crosses eight states and three time zones, for 3,940 kilometers. Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. Route 66 is a symbol of freedom: it contains the infinite possibilities that the last century promised. Some he maintained, others he saw fade away. Decommissioned in 1985, it can still be traveled on some sections, what today have become Historic Route 66. It was officially born on 11 November 1926, 100 years ago, when it was included in the US federal highway system with the number 66 (even if the work ended in 1938). A monument to pop culture, she has been chronicled in countless works across the arts. To celebrate its anniversary, here are 8 films where it is an integral part of the plot.
Route 66, 100 years of stars and stripes history
Route 66 was the route of migration during the Great Depression. Countless families passed through there who, destroyed by the economic crisis and the dust storms of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, abandoned the agricultural regions of the Midwest and the Great Plains to look for work in rich California, halfway between hope and precariousness. It is also the road of post-war car travel and the counterculture of the 1960s, of the first mass tourism in the States, of diners and gas stations with neon signs.
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Fury (1940)
The first film that opened the doors to Route 66 to the collective imagination, even outside the States, is Wrath by John Ford, 1940, based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, the one who first defined the Route as the Mother Road. It follows the journey of the Joad family, forced to abandon their Oklahoma farm during the Great Depression after being evicted and seeing all their livelihoods disappear due to drought. The Joads then set off towards the Eden of those years, California. However, their journey is not a bed of roses: behind the hope lies the exploitation of workers and the failure of the promise of American prosperity. The cast also includes Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda.
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Detour - Detour to Hell (1945)
The atmosphere of Detour by Edgar G. Ulmer (1945) is much darker, where Route 66 no longer has anything romantic about it. This time the trip belongs to New York pianist Al Roberts (Tom Neal), who tries to reach his girlfriend Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake) in Los Angeles, resorting only to hitchhiking. Once he arrives in Arizona, the passage offered to him by a man becomes the beginning of a tragic series of events dotted with deaths.
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Easy Rider – Freedom and Fear (1969)
Towards the end of the 1960s, Route 66 had become synonymous with the counterculture and the protest of a part of Americans towards the more conservative and conformist side of the country. Travel is now synonymous with rebellion against well-rooted social constructs. It is told well on the big screen in Easy Rider – Freedom and Fear by Dennis Hopper (1969), where Wyatt (Captain America, Peter Fonda) and Billy (Hopper himself) speed along Route 66 on a motorcycle, long hair blowing in the wind and rock music to accompany them, after concluding a drug deal in Los Angeles, with the final destination being New Orleans, on the occasion of Mardi Gras (Carnival Shrove Tuesday). Between Harley-Davidsons, rural landscapes, leather jackets, bandanas and stars and stripes, the film is considered a turning point for the road movie genre and one of the manifestos of the New Hollywood movement. Also in the cast is Jack Nicholson, an alcoholic lawyer met in the cell by the protagonists.
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Two-Lane Road (1971)
Route 66 is not always the means by which to reach a destination. It is not in Two-Lane Blacktop by Monte Hellman, 1971, where it is instead the existential metaphor of those who run without a finish line to reach. Here instead of Harleys there are cars. One is the Chevrolet modified for racing with the two protagonists on board, identified only as the Driver (the singer-songwriter James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys), to which is then added a wandering girl met by chance (Laurie Bird). The other is the Pontiac GTO of a guy we only know as GTO (Warren Oates). The two cars compete: whoever arrives in Washington first will win. Over the years the film has become a cult, also reinterpreting the historical period in which it was released. Those were the times when Route 66 was starting to be replaced by the new network of Interstate Highways.
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Starman (1984)
The road movie meets science fiction in John Carpenter's Starman. The protagonist Scott/Starman, Jeff Bridges, is an extraterrestrial who - having arrived on Earth - takes the form of the deceased husband of Jenny Hayden, played by Karen Allen. He pushes her to accompany him from Wisconsin to Arizona: she only has three days to reach the place where her spaceship will have to recover him. The two thus become fugitives, chased by the authorities on Jenny's trail, and cross the United States by car, while the woman abandons her initial reluctance towards her traveling companion and love is born between the two. In Starman Route 66 enters through the locations: some scenes were filmed in Arizona, in Coconino county, in particular around the Meteor Crater and the Meteor City Trading Post.
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Bagdad Café (1987)
Among the titles that most created the current imagination of Route 66 there is also Bagdad Café by Percy Adlon (1987), set in a cafeteria-motel in the Mojave Desert in California. German tourist Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht) arrives there and forms an unusual friendship with the owner Brenda (CCH Pounder). The place, lost in nowhere, is in crisis. However, Jasmin's presence manages to stir something up and the café-motel becomes a meeting place for travellers, a small community in the middle of nowhere. The film is thus pervaded by the sense of solitude of the desert and the warmth generated by chance encounters. The set became a tourist stop: the Sidewinder Café in Newberry Springs, where filming took place, was later renamed the Bagdad Café.
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Rain Man (1988)
Winner of four Oscars, in Rain Man by Barry Levinson (1988) the journey is that of Charlie Babbit (Tom Cruise), who discovers after his father's death that he has an autistic older brother (Dustin Hoffman, Oscar for best leading actor), a guest in a care facility not far from Cincinnati, where his father lived. Charlie takes him away from the clinic and together they begin to drive the 2,000 kilometers that separate them from Los Angeles. Also in the cast is Valeria Golino in the role of Susanna, Charlie's girlfriend, in one of her first big Hollywood roles.
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Cars – Roaring Engines (2006)
In the new millennium, Route 66 is the protagonist of blockbusters with the animated film Cars (2006) by John Lassater, produced by Pixar and co-produced by Disney. The protagonist racing car is Lightning McQueen, who, while traveling to a race in California, accidentally ends up in Radiator Springs, a forgotten town along the old Route 66. Here he meets a community of cars that teaches him to slow down and rediscover the value of relationships, in contrast to his obsession with speed and success. Radiator Springs becomes the imaginary place where the stories of many towns that have fallen into decline after being cut off from the new traffic flows of the most modern infrastructures are concentrated.
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