Favourite travel flicks (that don't involve Christmas)

If you have an urge to travel, but for whatever reason, you can't the next best option may be to watch a movie about travel. Or at least one that will take you on a journey of some kind.

Last December, I penned a post about some of my favourite Christmas movies, and they all involved some element of travel.

I've shared some of my favourite travel books in the past; now here are some of my favourite "travel" movies. They're not travelogues or documentaries about travel; they're fictional action movies that involve a fairly prominent degree of travel.

You may notice none of them involve paddling trips or anything to do with parrots; that's because I plan to blog about those more specific types of travel experiences in the movies in some future posts.

So they are - some of my favourite travel movies.

Any Indiana Jones movie. These movies may have inspired many to launch a career in archaeology (although if they did not heed Indy's words, "We do not follow maps to buried treasure - and 'X' never, ever marks the spot," they might be disappointed). Not many movie series involve more travel than this franchise. Indy's in South America, Nepal, Egypt, China, India, Italy, Austria, Germany, and even the fictional country of the Republic of Hatay (filmed in Jordan). Plus they always feature those cool "map route" video views.


 
Across the Pacific

You really can't beat the series for travel.

Any James Bond movie. Right on the heels of the Indy Jones flicks (some would say just ahead of) are the adventures of British spy 007.

That's a long list of places 007 has visited...

There's no doubt he gets around...the first Bond movie I ever watched featured him in China and Japan (You Only Live Twice).

The next time I saw him, he was in Venice (like Indy in that city, he's in the company of a ravishing blonde), then Brazil - then outer space! He's also been to India, Thailand, Cuba, the USA, Korea, Iceland, Montenegro, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Turkey, and Yugoslavia.

He's travelled by air, by boat, by space ship, by car (with that famous Aston Martin) and by train. He really gets around, that James...

Murder on the Orient Express. One of Bond's best-known scenes is the fight with SPECTRE assassin Red Grant while on the Orient Express in From Russia with Love. It's much more violent than the murder committed in the 1974 movie based on the Agatha Christie mystery novel, but like FRWL, it starts out in Turkey and heads east toward Paris. It's not only a great whodunit, it involves travel on one of history's most luxurious trains.

Contact!

High Road to China. A 1983 adventure flick set in the 1920s, starring Tom Selleck - the man who almost became Indy Jones ahead of Harrison Ford (think about that). But his contract with the Magnum P.I. television series would not allow it.

Selleck plays a pilot hired to fly from Istanbul (how do all these movies seem to start in Istanbul?) to China to find her missing father. It's a real fun flick to watch.

King Solomon's Mines. Based on the book by H. Rider Haggard, there are several versions of this movie, but my favourite is the 1950 release starring Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. Again, the main female lead hires the main male lead to help her find a missing person, this time a husband and along the way through unexplored Africa of the 19th century, they find the famous diamond mines.

There's no word on whether Kerr's character arrives in Kenya via Turkey. But you never know...


Watch out for the rhinos!

Alaska. Starring a young Thora Birch and Dirk Benedict (Faceman from "The A Team" television series), this is a family adventure movie about two kids looking for their bush pilot father who's crashed somewhere in the remote Alaskan wilderness. They kayak and hike their way through the wilds to find him, stopping an evil poacher (played, appropriately, by Charlton Heston) and saving a polar bear cub along the way.

How the West was Won. Based on the Louis L'Amour novel of the same time, this star-studded flick - featuring the likes of James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, John Wayne, Karl Malden, and George Peppard to name but a few - chronicles the spread of American settlers from the eastern seaboard westward across the plains to the mountains on the Pacific coast. They travel by canal ferry, canoe, river raft, wagon train, paddlewheeler, horseback, and locomotive across the land and across the screen.

To the Ends of the Earth. A film noir movie from 1948, it follows the travels of US narcotics agent Michael Barrows (played by Dick Powell) from San Francisco to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Egypt, from Egypt to the Caribbean as he tracks a gang of murderous drug lords. Really well done, and it has a very surprising twist at the end. (He never makes it to Turkey, though!)

Around the World in 80 Days. I've seen two versions of this movie based on the book by Jules Verne and enjoyed them both immensely, one with David Niven starring as Phileas Fogg, the other with Pierce Brosnan playing the main character. They travel around the world from London and back, by balloon, steamer, and rail, racing against the clock to win a bet. Great fun.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The original Hemingway story takes place only in Africa, but in the movie with Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, and Ava Gardner, it has the main character - writer Harry Street - also showing up in Spain and Italy as part of the back story, told through the device of flashback. Good stuff, a pretty decent adaptation of the short story.


Ava Gardner is one of the lovely ladies in this film.

So...those are some of my favourite travel movies - what are yours?