Road Movies: The Quest for Home

Kirk McElhearn

One Saturday some 30 years ago, I saw a triple feature at a cinema in Lower Manhattan. That day, the white screen in the dark room was filled with three unforgettable road movies: The Searchers, Stalker, and Kings of the Road. I had never thought much about the road movie, and after that day, I realized that not only did this genre touch me deeply, but I understood what that type of film was saying. These three great movies all tell stories of people on the road, searching for home. And that's what the road movie is all about.
Ever since I had first seen Kings of the Road, sometime in the late 1970s, I had been fascinated by this minimalist story of two men wandering in the gray German landscape. I had probably seen it a half-dozen times by then, but, back in the pre-DVD days, it was hard to see foreign films. You could only catch them occasionally at one of the handful of movie theaters in Manhattan that screened foreign films. So I jumped at the chance to see it again, at a retrospective of Wim Wenders' movies at the Film Forum in Greenwich Village in July, 1982.On the Road Again
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