The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys around the World

By Jose Duarte and Timothy Corrigan

The road movie is one of the most tried and true genres, a staple since the earliest days of cinema. This book looks at the road movie from a wider perspective than ever before, exploring the motif of travel not just in American films—where it has been most prominent—but via movies from other nations as well. Gathering contributions from around the world, the book shows how the road movie, altered and refracted in every new international iteration, offers a new way of thinking about the ever-shifting sense of place and space in the globalized world.

Through analyses of such films as Guantanamera (Cuba), Wrong Side of the Road (Australia), Five Golden Flowers (China), Africa United (South Africa), and Sightseers (England), The Global Road Movie enables us to think afresh about how today’s road movies fit into the history of the genre and what they can tell us about how people move about in the world today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783208784

Book preview

Section 1

The Americas

Chapter 1

Learning to Drive: Midcentury Guidance Films and the Middle-of-the-Road Politics of the American Road Movie

Devin Orgeron

The late 1990s brought with them a still-lingering spike in the academic interest in the road movie, and a fair amount of that scholarship has focused on American contributions to this nebulous, mythically signifying cinematic phenomenon.¹ There has been, in much of this work, some recognition of the literary roots of this semi-generic cinematic category (from Homer’s The Odyssey to Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz).² The road movie’s specifically cinematic generic predecessors have also been explored (from early automotive trick films, to the American western, and Film Noir).³ Some of us have even attempted to establish a constellation of cinematic exchange between nations and major cinematic ‘movements’ that has itself moved along and within the generic confines of the imagined highways that connect us, one to the other, film-to-film, nation-to-nation.⁴ In this respect, the study that follows will feel like a detour – a pause in what seems to be a forward-moving critical momentum that has brought scholars and thinkers to a point of looking around and ahead, rather than backwards. The road movie as a cinematic category continues to be relevant, these studies suggest. And isn’t it interesting to see the hold it and its myths have on other and especially emerging cinemas?

The answer, of course, is a resounding ‘yes!’ But we still have some looking back to do.

The American road movie’s place in international film history and its international progeny exist not in isolation but in conversation with a widespread domestic need to domesticate the American driver, who had become a de facto stand-in for a broader understanding of ‘American youth’ in the years after the Second World War. Evidence of this need can be found in another sub-cinematic boom occurring before and during the 1960s–70s, as the first wave of American road movies was swelling: the American educational film.

16mm classroom films. If you were born before the rise of video in the 1980s, you experienced them. And, chances are, the images from these films most permanently etched into your mind are images, many of them quite gruesome, from driver safety films. In the pages that follow, I will examine an historical, thematic and chronological range of what we might broadly refer to as ‘driver education films’. My hope is to demonstrate the degree to which the classic American road movie from the 1960s–70s was produced in conversation with these and related regulatory efforts. And that response, as we shall see, was often surprising in its concurrent regulatory impulses. This is to say that, for a period of time, the road movie was responding to the 16mm clampdown on the American driver, and the driver education film was, in its own manner, riffing on tropes that had become central to the American road movie. Acknowledging, as it does, the complexities of this imagined intersection between a socially engineered ‘culture’ and some imagined notion of ‘counterculture’, this work is uniquely equipped to demonstrate the ways in which the road’s identification as a site of countercultural rebellion (in the US and abroad) has been, to some degree, misunderstood. Specifically, I am interested in examining the manner by which these films, designed for the classroom, attempt to control or otherwise defuse the notion of vehicular freedom and boundless mobility that would appear to be on offer in the 1960s-70s road movie.

Signal 30 (Richard Wayman/Highway Safety Foundation, 1959) and the Manufacturing of Fear

This is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions, nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.

(Signal 30, opening crawl)

Scholars, collectors and enthusiasts of educational films are interested in notions of genericity, and the fruits of their labour (screenings, shows, symposia and conferences, academic or popular articles and books) are often organized according to type.⁵ Perhaps because of their long and successful in-classroom runs (which means great numbers of these films were produced), and also because of their promise of sensational, often taboo images, sex hygiene and driving films turn up repeatedly (for sale on eBay, for viewing at specially arranged screenings across the country and within the pages of scholarly works dedicated to the phenomenon of the educational film). The mass-production of these films and their subsequent longevity speaks to widespread shifts in pedagogical practice after the Second World War: both the method and the material of what would become standard American education were undergoing profound re-evaluation, and 16mm film – the material itself as well as the pedagogical concept it embodied – was as experimental as its sometimes lurid, seemingly non-academic subject matter.⁶

One result of all of this experimentation, among many, was the creation of what might best be referred to as ‘micro-industries’ in the educational media business. While major educational film manufacturers existed and thrived (Encyclopedia Britannica is a fine example on one end, or Coronet, on another end), the demand was high enough to support smaller, regional outfits whose reach, in retrospect, is astonishing.⁷ One such company (though its inception had less to do with the establishment of a company and more to do with what would appear to be a sincere desire to assist local law enforcement in their struggle to curtail highway deaths) was the ‘official’ sounding Highway Safety Foundation, a division of The Ohio Department of Highway Safety.⁸

The outfit was the brainchild of Dick Wayman, who began by making still photographs of highway wrecks in and near Mansfield, Ohio, and his chief collaborator and fellow photographer, Phyllis Vaughn. Wayman and Vaughn, before making films, shared their photographs with local law enforcement, who would eventually lend their credentials (if not their financial support) to special lecture/slideshows at local gatherings, state fairs, etc. Wayman, Vaughn and a group of like-minded, roving camera operators and specialists, recognizing the impact and potential of these materials, soon transformed their travelling show into a small-scale film production operation. Taking full advantage of the extreme portability of 16mm equipment and banking (smartly) on what would appear to be an ever-escalating use of filmed materials in American classrooms, The Highway Safety Foundation is a model for what was possible in the Eisenhower-era business of classroom films.

Their first short film, Signal 30, is by no means the first highway safety film. In fact, the genre had been kicking around the educational circuit since the 1930s.⁹ But Signal 30 is revolutionary in its methodology as well as its near-ubiquity in the pre-1980s classroom. What made this film unique? What about it spurred dozens of followers (Highway Safety Foundation films and others) forward? What kept it in rotation in American high school classrooms for so long?

In short, the film’s successes can be boiled down to one concept: the rhetorical use and careful deployment of violence.¹⁰ In fact, for a film produced by amateurs (amateurs, it should be noted, in all of the fields they were stepping into: law enforcement; moving image production; education), the film’s psychological impact is extraordinary. Its power, I would argue, is in some ways a product of its apparent amateurism – its spontaneity; a point the film’s opening crawl seems distinctly aware of, even as it pretends to apologize for sub-Hollywood production standards and ‘bad acting’.¹¹

This is to suggest that, by 1959, nontheatrical viewers had established a set of expectations with regard to the polish and pedagogical style of educational fare. Tone of narrational voice, music, pacing and a degree of either gravitas (Encyclopedia Britannica), or campy playfulness and good humour (Coronet) were, perhaps, necessarily somewhat predictable.¹² Some distance between Hollywood and the educational circuit was required. Hollywood films were seen as frivolous and removed, indeed, in every way possible from the supposed ‘mission’ of education.¹³ So, most educational filmmakers found and maintained a balance between pedagogical rigor and aesthetic polish. Signal 30, like the best feature films of the 1960s and 1970s, seems to have written its own rule-book, establishing its own mode of address and its own barometer for what the viewer (and those monitoring the appropriateness of what the viewer might or might not see) could tolerate.

The film opens on black leader and, abruptly, the soundtrack belies its subject: the distinct sound of tires screeching and metal crunching take us from a black screen to a poorly lit scene of automotive death. Dramatic music swells as the camera nervously paces around the bloody trauma, pausing briefly on a lifeless arm swinging from the door of a mangled blue sedan. This is followed by the opening crawl cited above, set against grainy, daylight footage of a not-too-busy two-lane highway. Those warnings about the film’s ‘deficiencies’ are followed by an (appropriately enough) awkwardly acted scene of a highway patrol dispatcher taking a call for a double signal 30 (which necessitates the earnestly narrated definition that follows the main titles for the film). Our narrator explains that a ‘signal 30’ is police code for a highway fatality. And the frankness of the film’s opening images, coupled with this information, alerts the viewer to (but hardly prepares him for) the carnage that is to follow. It is, however, our narrator’s request of viewers that charges the scenes that follow to such an unprecedented degree. The narrator implores ‘put yourselves and your family in these untouched, unstaged scenes. You or a loved one of yours can easily be a signal 30’.

After the double signal 30 that begins the film (a devastating scene involving an out of control cattle truck), a short segment establishes a pattern – a distinct rhetorical strategy – that the film will maintain through its entirety. The strategy focuses squarely on guided spectatorial identification: we are asked, at various moments, to identify with law enforcement (who must tend to these scenes) and the victims and their families (whose lives are altered or ended as a result). First, however, the viewer’s faith in law enforcement must, itself, be enforced.

The viewer is treated to a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the training a highway patrolman must undergo, with special emphasis on the patrolman’s supreme dedication. The idea itself is difficult to convey in a two-minute montage, so it will become a refrain throughout the film: the patrolman, like the rules he enforces, has the driver’s well-being in mind and carries a significant portion of the burden of any driver’s outright disregard. Routine safety checks, traffic laws, speed limits, etc. are not, the film is at pains to explain, there simply to infringe upon the freedom of our driving citizens. What becomes clear as the film continues is the degree to which its producers wish to suggest that all traffic incidents are, in fact, the result of driver error or inattention to the rules that are in place.

After this brief sidebar, the barrage of fatalities and (mercifully?) near fatalities kicks into full swing: two trucks disregard the speed limit, swerve to miss a fender bender and collide into one another, setting the scene ablaze (our narrator calmly describes as charred remains are pulled from the cabins); a careless driver narrowly escapes with his life and the life of his passenger, their rolled car, pierced by the crossbar of a mailbox, reminding them of how close it was; a deaf man in a pickup truck is ploughed over by a fast-moving train at a railroad crossing; a driver loses control and is thrown from his car and survives with serious injuries after 20 men lift the car from his suffering body; a 17-year-old boy in red convertible fails to yield the right of way and rams into a hardtop, is critically injured (the pair in the hardtop will die within hours); a young man after a stag party (drunk) is crushed between the driver’s side door and the door post, though his car is barely damaged; a high school football star (the image the film begins with) wraps his car around a tree – our narrator asks that we identify with the men removing body; a husband ignores the speed limit, leaving his wife to survive the crash (horrifying live audio captures her terror at the scene).

While the near-dizzying array of tragedies is far from over, our filmmakers pause, here, to echo what are surely the audiences’ sentiments. Our narrator changes gears: ‘We’re cruel, cold and harsh, you say? You shouldn’t be made to see and hear this. How could we give a better lesson on carelessness?’ (Signal 30, 1959). What might, at first glance, be considered an act of mercy (a pause in the bloodbath) is more critically a barely veiled attempt on the part of the filmmakers to indicate that every fatality on offer in this film, every injury, is the result of at least one driver’s disregard for the rules (here, ‘carelessness’). The rapid-fire narration of the film, its unending need to force the viewer to bear witness, is intended to cause the viewer to not question the logic of this assertion – to not question the possibility that there might be other factors in play or that the reasons behind the scenes ‘witnessed’ might, in fact, be other than what our narrator is suggesting.¹⁴ Viewers are, in other words, meant to accept the images as transparent, indexical representations of the actual highway mishaps being narrated.

The barrage continues: a flipped car results, miraculously, in no injuries; a pipe truck driver is crushed and impaled by his load; a triple signal 30 is the result of a driver’s unwillingness to stay to the right; a failure to yield right-of-way results in an especially grim scene, made all the more unsettling for what the film has us believe to be live audio recordings of the still-living victims (four are dead).

In a manner that will come to be key to our understanding of the 1960s–70s American road movie and its relationship to this as well as the vast majority of driver safety films that would follow, Signal 30 concludes (prior to a brief denouement imploring viewers to heed the film’s warning: ‘whether we show you or your loved ones in the ugly sprawl of death is largely up to you’) within the domestic space – within the home of the bereaved wife of a deceased, careless (she claims he often drove too fast) driver. The scene switches to a patrol car pulling into the driveway of a small, suburban home as our narrator asks: ‘what is the impact on a family whose husband and father met death? Let’s watch and listen’.

Figure 1: The domestic obsessions of the midcentury driving film here take the shape an awkward visitation. A patrolman visits the home of a bereaved wife and the toll of automotive carelessness is foregrounded. Note the composition of the shot, which underscores the emptiness of the woman’s space. They are also, interestingly, shot against a corner. The opening crawl tells us that the film is not up to Hollywood standards, but there is clearly a photographer’s sensibility behind these moments. The Highway Safety Foundation 1959), Signal 30. Public Domain.

We switch to a two-shot of the patrolman and the bereaved seated next to one another, the woman’s sparsely decorated living room oddly framed to accentuate the literal corner she finds herself in. The patrolman begins awkwardly: ‘today I would like to get some sort of a message from you to pass on to the motoring public’. The wife goes on to explain that her husband ‘was a lineman for the Ohio Edison Company. He worked with high voltage. He had a very dangerous job’. The information takes a second to take hold. He was not killed on the job (where rules and regulations are a given), but on his time. The officer continues by asking ‘how has this accident affected your life – and your family’s …?’ Her answer drives home the film’s purpose, its domestic intentions. She says ‘well, it means I will have to go to work very shortly to provide for the children’s education, all their needs … whereas they would have had a father to help with that’.

The formula set in place in Signal 30 would govern the Highway Safety Foundation’s next 13 films. Their final film, Options to Live (Highway Safety Foundation, 1979), in fact, recycles footage from previous productions (a common enough practice in the educational film business that here points up the weird anonymity and interchangeability of the tragedies on display). In short, they and other filmmakers would rely on a combination of shock and guided identification (with law enforcement, family members, injured drivers, etc.) to steer drivers in the direction of thoughtful driving. The aforementioned ‘boom’ in the production of driver safety films that would follow coincided with changes in educational practice, as film would begin to vie for classroom time. There were also, however, other precipitating factors. Ralph Nader’s 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed would eventually lead to seatbelt legislation in 1968 (manufacturers were required to install them, but drivers were free to decide whether or not to wear them until the state began regulating this in 1984) (Nader 1965). Automotive safety, in other words, was being discussed and debated, both in Detroit and in American living rooms and classrooms.¹⁵

As these discussions were taking place across the country, however, a cinematic phenomenon was also taking shape. Though its roots go back much further, the American road movie begins to form around 1967 with the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. And, as we shall see, the genre itself organizes around the same primary formula as the era’s highway safety efforts: carefully deployed, often grim violence coupled with an emphasis (though sometimes veiled) on the communities the lone road movie protagonists seems to be leaving behind. In its efforts to remain relevant, in fact, the driver safety film would eventually come to look to the road movie for cues on how to appeal to young viewers. Sometimes quite directly.

Safety at the Crossroads: In Defence of the Defensive Driver

Signal 30 was only the first in a chain of driver safety films that would capitalize on the rhetorical effects of violence and the supposed threat to the symbolic wholeness of the domestic space posed by the careless driver. Though seldom discussed, the road movie, too, was (and, to some degree, remains) obsessed with the role of the domestic, with a kind of barely veiled longing for home and order in the midst of all that freedom and disorder.

Dorothy’s ‘there’s no place like home’ finds its analogue, for instance, in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde early on as the duo works to create a makeshift family to fill the void Bonnie feels for the family she’s left behind. The film’s dusty, dreamlike family reunion underscores the dire finality of Bonnie’s decision to leave home.

Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) finds our mobile duo, in the absence of women, seeking (or passing through) ‘alternative’ domestic possibilities. That they must move on from the homestead, the commune, and, towards the end, the brothel is meant to function as an indictment of an America that will no longer tolerate ‘outsiders’. It also, however, highlights that the film’s underexplored, Oz-like admission that the homes they have presumably left behind are also irreplaceable.

Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), simultaneously more subtle and more explicit in this regard, begins ‘moving’ when Kit murders Holly’s father, setting the family home ablaze and escaping with her to no place in particular. The car and its mobility are not home (or anything related to it). And for a while this liminality is sufficient escape. But, before too long, Kit’s domestic instincts prevail: their makeshift wilderness campground is, perhaps, the film’s most lucid indicator of this tendency.

Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop (1971), in many ways the most opaque of this wave of road movies, is notable, in part, for its lack of meaningful dialogue. Less discussed is the film’s lack of defined space (i.e. anything resembling ‘home’). Hellman’s film is so dedicated to its protagonists’ need to be ‘between’ some undefined ‘here’ and ‘there’ that the film’s ending can’t help but replicate the even by then hackneyed device of the film bursting into flames in the projector. There is no continuing, no ending, and the film’s lacks, thereby, begin to define it (it is a film about home … about communication).

Upon its release in 1967, it was Bonnie and Clyde’s highly choreographed and unprecedentedly frank violence that shocked audiences and critics alike. From Clyde’s first and largely accidental murder until the couple is torn apart by vigilante and official bullets at film’s end, the film’s carefully placed, thoughtfully handled brutality martyrizes the couple.¹⁶ It also, however, serves to warn a generation of young people to think carefully about the world they believe they are escaping from as well as the world they believe themselves to be escaping to. Minutes into their journey, Bonnie and Clyde are as trapped, by their own actions, as Bonnie was at the beginning of the film, behind the bars of her bed, frustrated with her own small-town domestic existence and intrigued by the options Clyde seems to carry with him.

Martyrdom and countercultural heroism aside, each of these films uses violence to highlight their characters’ figurative immobility in the midst of their literal mobility. While they fall short of promoting some Nixonian notion of ‘law and order’, they are also sharply critical of their characters’ inability to seek options other than flight. These films and many like them (made both in the US and elsewhere in the Post-Vietnam era) imagine characters for whom the road is an idealized container for an idealized notion of non-containment. But this notion is repeatedly and harshly critiqued. Characters die in a spray of bullets; they are judged (often unfairly); the films end; they drive off cliffs; they are apprehended, contained. Again and again, these films long for a corrected version of community, of the domestic and, absent that, they end tragically.

A road safety film borrowing directly from a film like Bonnie and Clyde, though, might seem somewhat puzzling. The Crossroads Crash (Jack Lieb Productions Inc., 1973), however, does precisely this in its effort to promote the importance of defensive driving. And, like its source, the film seems most defensive of a carefully constructed notion of responsibility.

The educational film business was tricky, in part, because it was always a fight against time. In order for a film to seem relevant, contemporary, even hip, educational film producers (especially in the 1970s) would often look to Hollywood for cues that would give their productions an edge – a little extra shelf-life.¹⁷ The Crossroads Crash begins with a bumbling bank robbery that resembles, in almost every detail (though more comically), the first heist in Bonnie and Clyde where the couple is accompanied by their new driver, C.W. Moss. A couple dressed in 1930s gangster attire robs the River Forest State Bank and Trust Company, only to have their efforts undone by their careless (and late) driver. Despite sartorial hints to the contrary, the trio drive off in a decidedly 1970s sedan as the music quickens to a comic, silent film style pacing. The action is, like the music (and like similar scenes in Bonnie and Clyde) sped up to a frantic pace, the film’s editors replicating (to the best of their abilities) Dede Allen’s inspired editing of Penn’s film, moving inside and outside the car, to various witnesses and passersby, and finally landing on the inevitable: a major collision at an intersection, just as the titles roll, indicating that the film is made to supplement the National Safety Council’s Defensive Driving Course.

Figure 2: Modeled on characters from Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Crossroads Crash (1973) here finds our robbers counting their take in the backseat of their large, 1970s sedan while their moll makes a careless and rushed getaway. Jack Lieb Productions (1973), The Crossroads Crash. Public Domain.

As the trio drives away from the bank, our narrator keys viewers into the film’s primary objective:

Did you ever notice how people in a hurry tend to disobey the rules? Now that can get them in a lot of trouble. If you happen to be in their way, it can also get you in a lot of trouble. It isn’t everyday you run into a bank robber. But one out of three accidents occur at intersections. They happen everyday. And usually because somebody did something wrong. Besides obeying the rules yourself, you’ve always got to look out for the other guy.¹⁸

What is fascinating about this film is its cagey, unusually self-aware and broadly signifying language, as well as what appears to be its countercultural source material. Obviously, the film’s Bonnie and Clyde stand-ins are ‘the other guy’ – their disregard for the law established in more than one way. The audience, thereby, becomes the presumptive representative for proper, orderly driving (and living). Once again, the film’s rhetorical strategies are key: we are asked to identify not with the bank-robbing gang the film begins with, but with the drivers who may suffer dramatically and irreversibly because of someone else’s careless disregard. And, while it is made somewhat more complex for Bonnie and Clyde’s attractiveness and their attempts at vigilante justice, I would suggest that Penn’s film is similarly keen to align the viewer’s point of view with the gang’s victims as well (innocent as well as more problematic). The mutability of point of view is made all the more clear in this classroom film’s locational focus: the intersection. As our narrator indicates:

An intersection is a place where traffic moves in many directions. This intersection is regulated by a traffic light. It is regulated, but not controlled. The control comes from the drivers themselves. A traffic light is a timing device. It measures the time allotted for each line of traffic to move ahead. It says who must yield the right of way. But it does not prevent other drivers from being wrong. When they are, the results can be disastrous.

The choice of words here is important. The film wants to suggest to viewers that the machinery of traffic safety is, in no way, an impediment to their personal freedom. Their movement is ‘regulated and not controlled’. And, per the film’s careful rhetoric, self-control becomes a prized notion, something with which the viewer should ‘elect’ to identify. The 1960s–70s road movie was similarly complex in its spectatorial demands. In fact, I would argue, a whiff of charisma here and there aside (Clyde, Kit, Captain America and The Driver), the road movie’s protagonists are, for their inarticulateness, their bumbling brutality, their restlessness, extremely and deliberately difficult identificatory subjects. Our point of view usefully and tellingly drifts.

After its Bonnie and Clyde preamble, this ten-minute film rather immediately becomes a fairly standard re-enactment of defensive driving situations and crash test demonstrations (though it closes, too, with one of the drivers we are meant to identify with driving by our hapless trio, wrecked on the side of the road). What fascinates me, however, is this film’s use of the intersection as a sort of microcosm of the American political/social ideal; a between space where behaviours are ‘regulated’ and not ‘controlled’. You are ‘free’ to disobey the rules. And some drivers will do precisely this. But there are consequences for all parties. As our narrator suggests: ‘As a driver, your first job is to know the rules. Your second, to obey them. Your third, to guard against the mistakes of others’. There is, in this work, a pronounced desire to be perceived as ‘hip’ or on the edge, while suggesting that viewers do, perhaps, the most ‘square’ thing imaginable: follow the rules. It is a logic the 1960s and 1970s road movie abides by as well. The countercultural fantasy of boundless freedom is, again and again, reined in, controlled.

An earlier Highway Safety Foundation film, A Matter of Judgment (Highway Safety Foundation, 1968), is a model for this sort of strategic, aesthetic manoeuvring between ‘straight’ education and ‘edgy’ countercultural sources. Where Signal 30 was remarkable for its utter frankness, A Matter of Judgment woos viewers to its point of view by speaking their language: aggressive bongo music combines with rapid-fire, new wave style editing techniques to create a more polished film calibrated to the evolving media savvy young filmgoer.¹⁹

But all of this changes rapidly as the film’s preamble wraps up and the film shifts to a fairly straightforward (with the exception of some truly lovely dashboard shots) ‘situation re-enactment’ format.²⁰ Like The Crossroads Crash, this film’s primary motive is to model responsibility. To do so, that aforementioned preamble to the film allows viewers access to the interior and highly distracted monologues of a selection of modern drivers whose whole attention is not wholly focused on the task of driving. The film (whose credits indicate support from the automotive industry as well) levels a sharp critique against the notion of the automobile as isolated ‘freedom bubble’ (a kind of thinking the road movie explores as well).

Where we have come to anticipate and accept the educational film’s lessons of responsible attentiveness, however, the road movie’s oft-misunderstood mythology would seem to revolve around the detached individuality of its various, anti-heroic drivers and riders – an isolationist perspective that, more frequently than not, is over-corrected by film’s end.

In language that might easily and usefully be applied to the road movies of the period, our narrator suggests that ‘to drive an automobile today is to be the absolute ruler over a package of concentrated horsepower that would’ve been the envy of the greatest rulers of the ancient world’. In the same breath, however, we are reminded that these ‘freedom machines’ ‘do not demand our whole attention – we drive them almost as if we were passengers in them’. A Matter of Judgment’s lesson (even its title!) seems to suggest a broader applicability to a host of issues coming to the fore in the American cultural landscape in the late 1960s. There is a desire, in this film, to make broader comments about social responsibility. This desire becomes more apparent in our narrator’s reminder that ‘driving a car involves social as well as legal responsibilities and each driver who takes his responsibility seriously is a helpful example to those around him’ (emphasis added). The Highway Safety Foundation, however, would