Earlier Classic Road Films:
Frank Capra's romantic comedy It Happened One Night (1934) was an archetypal 'road film', about a fleeing heiress (Claudette Colbert) accompanied by an unemployed newspaper reporter (Clark Gable) on the road - traveling by bus and by hitch-hiking. Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) was a quintessential 'road' film as Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) took an odyssey from her drab, black and white Kansas 'home' to the wonderful land of Oz to learn more about herself, while pursued by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). Two John Ford films were classic road films: Stagecoach (1939), an exciting western tale of the perilous adventures of a group aboard a stagecoach across Indian country between two frontier settlements (between Tonto, Arizona toward the Dry Fork and Apache Wells way stations, and finally to their destination - Lordsburg, New Mexico) during a sudden Apache uprising. And Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel, chronicled a journey of destitute Dust Bowl Okies, the Joad family, from their dispossessed Midwest farmlands to the promised land of California via Rte. 66.
Raoul Walsh's They Drive By Night (1940), told about a freelance truck-driving business by wildcat drivers, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan. Preston Sturges' screwball comedy Sullivan's Travels (1941) followed the road 'mission' of 'Sully' (Joel McCrea), a big-shot Hollywood director of lightweight comedies, along with an aspiring blonde actress simply called The Girl (Veronica Lake), to experience suffering in the world before producing his next socially-conscious film of hard times. Edgar Ulmer's film noir Detour (1946) was about a night-club pianist Al Roberts (Tom Neal) hitching his way from New York to LA who encountered another hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage) - more than he bargained for.