New Mexico Magazine Top 5 New Mexico Roadtrip Movies

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Plus: 10 Top Can't-Miss, Made-In-New Mexico Movies

Back when people could afford to drive for pleasure, not just to go to work or to stock up on such necessities as asthma medication or Twinkies, the road-trip movie reminded Americans that the quest for enlightenment often began at the on-ramp. Now, Jeff Acker points out that frequently, such travelers also discovered that the road to self-discovery led to New Mexico, a place of both spiritual and geographic exploration.

Easy Rider (1969)
The granddaddy of all road movies opens in northern New Mexico, though it’s posing for someplace south of the border. Wyatt and Billy (Peter Fonda and the film’s director, Dennis Hopper) buy a bunch of cocaine, sell it in L.A., and strike out on customized motorcycles, bound for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Hopper says he envisioned Easy Rider as a 20th-century Western, hence the names: Wyatt (Earp) and Billy (the Kid). As in cowboy movies of yore, the duo’s travels take them across the Southwest. Fate leads them to a commune near Taos (well, most of it—see Road Scholar, below). They visit hot springs near the Río Grande and attend a parade in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where they spend a night in jail with ACLU lawyer and town drunk George Hanson (Jack Nicholson). Most of the film’s message ushers from George’s mouth (along with much marijuana smoke). Freedom, he says, is “what it’s all about, alright, but talkin’ about it and being it—that’s two different things.” Things take a turn for the worse when the boys get to Louisiana. Shouldn’t have left the 47th state, fellas. Parts of the movie have aged better than others, but what have held up best are the visuals—sun-drenched Southwestern scenery, gleaming choppers, long hair flowing in the breeze—and the soundtrack. Easy Rider marked a big leap forward in the integration of pop music with film. Hopper considered the music a part of the movie’s narrative, and nowhere does that work better than in the lyrics and soaring melody of one of its best songs, The Byrds’ “I Wasn’t Born to Follow.” The title says it all.

Convoy (1978)
Here’s another film about outlaw heroes trying to live free and avoid the long arm of the Establishment. This time the protagonists aren’t hippies, exactly—they’re truckers. The year is 1978, and much of Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, inspired by the cornball hit single of the same name, is set in New Mexico, along an I-40 that seems a sort of giant disco on wheels. The locations themselves aren’t necessarily along that stretch of highway, but are nonetheless an interesting cross section of New Mexico: Albuquerque, Cerrillos, Cuba, Las Vegas, Madrid, White Sands. The lead bad boy is played by Kris Kristofferson—you’ve got to love a movie whose hero’s handle is “Rubber Duck”—with Tesuque resident Ali MacGraw as a journalist who can’t resist his pedal-to-the-metal charm. Full of chasin’, fightin’, lovin’, and endlessly entertainin’ CB-radio jargon (“Anybody need a bear report?”), Convoy is more than just a movie—it’s an experience.

Pow Wow Highway (1989)
Philbert (Gary Farmer) is a soft-spoken, childlike mystic who draws equal inspiration
from nature and from serendipitously timed television commercials. His companion, Buddy (A Martinez), is more of a pragmatist, prone to solving problems with his fists. The two leave the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana in an ancient Buick that Philbert dubs “Protector.” Their mission: to bust Buddy’s sister, Bonnie (Joannelle Nadine Romero), out of a Santa Fe jail. Like all great road-trip movies, this gem from director Jonathan Wacks (currently chairman of the College of Santa Fe’s film department) features a soul-stirring mix of music and landscapes (other locations include Nambé Pueblo and Taos), but even more beautiful are the sequences depicting Philbert and Buddy’s imagined memories of their Native ancestors.

Road Scholar (1993)
“The sixties never ended in Santa Fe,” observes Romanian-born poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu in this meditative travelogue directed by Roger Weisberg—the only documentary on this list. Codrescu backs up his claim with footage of him circling the Plaza with a throng of hippies, singing “Aquarius” in a bus driven by Lisa Law, whose photographs of countercultural icons are now in the collection of the
Smithsonian Institution. Law is a veteran of Taos’s New Buffalo Commune, which provided the inspiration for the commune scene in Easy Rider (though Hopper and his crew, denied permission to film inside New Buffalo, had to re-create it in California). The film takes Codrescu to El Santuario de Chimayó and Taos Pueblo, where musician Robert Mirabal tells him, “This is definitely not America; I don’t consider it America.” It’s an insightful look at the elements that make New Mexico unlike any other place.

Lost in America (1985)
Albert Brooks’s comedy is the anti-road-trip movie. Director-writer Brooks and Julie Hagerty play California yuppies who, dissatisfied with their suburban lives, hit the road in a huge Winnebago. Their lives change, though not in the ways they’d planned. The first sign that something is awry comes when Brooks takes the wheel to the accompaniment of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”—the song that kicks off Wyatt and Billy’s journey in Easy Rider, and waves at a passing biker—who flips him off. Parts of the film were shot near Las Cruces, but there’s little distinctly New Mexican scenery. The movie’s genius lies in its gently hilarious examination of how people’s egos and expectations lead them astray—on the highway or anywhere else. (A noteworthy runner-up in this category is Two-Lane Blacktop, which stars a budding pop star who was going to Carolina in his mind but wound up in New Mexico instead. Yes, that’s a stringy-haired James Taylor at the wheel.)

Jeff Acker’s first movie review—of Superman (1978), parts of which were filmed near Gallup—was published in his elementary-school newspaper.

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