Road movies are one of the
archetypes of movie making in
1970's, which produced some of the finest examples of the genre, films littered with brooding
loner outlaw heroes speeding across the highways of
America.
Two classic examples from this period are Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971) , -the story of an amphetamine fuelled car delivery driver, and Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) - the latter starring Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.
There european equivalents can be found in the work of Wim Wenders, - the movies Alice in the Cities/Alice in den Städten (1974) and Kings of the Road/Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) in which the (always) male heros are transformed into an angst ridden figures plagued by existential crisis, a typically european phenomenon of the time, rather than thier outlaw American counterparts.