Director Stanley Donen's "Two for the Road" was released in late April 1967, right before the Summer of Love, but it reflected the concerns of a generation a decade older than the Flower Power crowd. At the same time, it served as a template for later road movie comedies, adopting nonlinear storytelling and sharp, witty, sometimes profane dialogue. The musical themes, their tone reflective of a look into the past, were penned by Henry Mancini. If there's a more qualified candidate for our "Cars in Movies" series, we haven't seen it. The film begins with Mark Wallace (Albert Finney), a successful architect, and his wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) as they fly to France for a Riviera tour in their Mercedes 230SL. They reminisce about their previous trips to this coast, and what those trips have meant to them...
The cars mark the different eras in their summers and lives as students and later as a married couple. They meet during a 1954 trip, first when Joanna rescues architecture student Mark's passport on the ferry from England, and later when the VW microbus carrying Joanna's choir is run off the road on the way to a music fest. Mark comes to the rescue, but the choir (except for Joanna) comes down with chicken pox, and Mark and Joanna decide to hitchhike...
The hitchhikers find things to argue about, and eventually an Alfa driver picks up Joanna, but leaves Mark by the roadside. This is one of the few anachronisms in the car chronology. The Bertone-bodied Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was new in spring of 1954, but not this Giulia 1600 version with the big tail lights, from 1963. Not long after this scene, the couple are reunited at the roadside, and in a scene at the beach, Joanna tells Mark she hates him. He suggests they get married, and she agrees.
As the story develops, director Donen reinforces the irony and maintains the comic tone by using quick jumps forward and back in time. This allows him to underline how the protagonists have changed, and to heighten the contrasts between the characters and their approaches to life. These conflicts reach a hilarious boiling point in the 1957 trip, when Mark and Joanna, now married two years, share a new Ford Country Squire with Mark's ex-girlfriend Cathy, her husband Howard and their spoiled brat of a daughter Ruthie...
The American Maxwell-Manchesters are prototype permissive parents, spouting Freudian psychobabble at each other and at Mark and Joanna. The Wallaces abandon the Maxwell-Manchesters not long after this scene, which follows a sequence where Ruthie throws a tantrum and pitches the car keys into the grass, stranding the party in their Ford at the roadside into the night...
The English couple finally gets to take a trip in their own car in 1959, when they bring this perky but hard-to-start 1950 MG-TD. This was before product placement played such a big part in the production design of films...
But if they'd read the script of "Two for the Road", the minions of Morris Garages, now part of BMC, might have paid a ransom to keep this product of theirs off camera. The couple's MG beings to make a funny noise on the way south, and eventually bursts into flame.
This disaster paves the way for a critical plot turn, when the Dalbrets, a wealthy French couple, rescue the Wallaces and take them in this Bentley S1 to their seaside retreat at the Cote d' Azur. Monsieur Dalbret introduces Mark to his Greek business partner, and this leads to a series of architectural commissions.
A couple of years later it also leads to a solo trip to France for architect and new dad Mark, who has a fling with a blonde named Simone driving a blue Renault Floride. Lke many developments in this prototype road movie, the affair is presaged by a scene on a winding two-lane, when the two literally make passes at each other. The red '61 Triumph Herald is Mark's new ride. In summer of '63, the Wallaces go again to the Riviera and bring their young daughter Caroline. Mark is absorbed with work, and Joanna has an affair with David, a brother-in-law of client Dalbret. A moment of truth occurs when Joanna returns to Mark, and he asks her why she has given up on David. She replies, "He's too serious." And this points out a theme of the story; Mark and Joanna are never so serious that they cannot laugh at themselves, or each other.
At fleeting moments in the story, the young couple on the roadside gets passed by their older, possibly wiser and certainly more prosperous selves. Towards the end of their "current" (1967) trip to Europe, Mark and Joanna have an argument in the Mercedes which, like this movie's quick cuts and sudden flashbacks and flash forwards, echoes French New Wave films, as well as dialogues between existentialists in Beat Generation cafés. "What would you do if I didn't exist?" asks Mark. Joanna replies, "I'd probably marry David." When he says she's made his point, she replies, "But you do exist."
The running gag of Mark misplacing his passport is repeated at the film's conclusion, when the couple stop at the Italian border control to present their documents. Mark, nervous about making a meeting in Rome with another high-profile client, begins to panic, but Joanna quietly places the passport on the SL's steering wheel. "Bitch", he says. "Bastard", she replies. In a movie marked by a consistent comic tone from start to finish, the viewer can assume this couple will continue their own comic interplay in the many miles (well, kilometers) ahead of them.
Photo Credits:
Top and 2nd from bottom: 20th Century Fox
Remainder: IMCDB.org (Internet Movie Cars Database)
