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BY DON GEORGE | about a month ago, my colleagues here at Salon had the happy opportunity to write about their favorite films of all time. At that point I was so enmeshed in the launch of Wanderlust that I had to reluctantly let the chance pass by. But the question has tempted my mind ever since, and so this week's column opens the envelope addressed Greatest Travel Film Ever.

There are numerous worthy contenders, of course, but for me the unquestionable winner is "The Passenger," directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, released in 1975.

"The Passenger" opens on a dry, dusty, monochromatic desert townscape: a dirt road running between sun-baked mud huts. North Africa. Even if you've never been there, the steady shot takes you there -- you can hear the flies buzzing, feel the dry, flat heat, taste the sand that gets into your mouth no matter what you do. Figures swathed in blue cloth walk away from the camera; children skitter through the sand.

A Range Rover enters the scene, a white man gets out, approaches a sitting figure, asks a question we can barely discern, "Can you tell me where is ...?"

Cut to another scene: The man, whose name we later learn is Locke and who is played by Jack Nicholson, walks into a tiny tailor shop. Four figures wrapped in white robes are there; two walk out as soon as he enters. Another steps in front of him and smiles slightly. The fourth mimes smoking a cigarette. Nicholson hands him a smoke and lights it. Then that man walks out of the shop.

The feeling is one the off-the-beaten-track traveler knows intimately: isolation, disorientation, a doesn't-anyone-around-here-speak-a-language-I-know and what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here-anyway kind of feeling.

I know this feeling so well by now that it lives in my bones, but the first time I saw "The Passenger," when it was new, that feeling was just a dream -- a kind of hunger I couldn't even put a name to. I just knew I wanted to find myself in a predicament like that, wanted to push the envelope so far that my world would be reduced to essences: communication by gesture, grimy survival, sweat and sand and water extracted precious drop by precious drop from a canteen -- things that can seem romantic in the cinema of the mind and terrifying when the film becomes your own. But I didn't know that then.

As the film unfolds, we learn that Locke is a British journalist who has come to Africa to cover a revolutionary insurrection. He is trying to find the leader of the rebels. We learn also, through flashbacks, that he is a man who embodies otherness: a Brit educated in the United States, a restless journalist wandering the world in search of stories, a man dissatisfied with the wife -- and the life -- he has left behind in England.

One thinks of Bruce Chatwin, of Wilfred Thesiger, even of T. E. Lawrence -- of all the great restless, romantic British wanderer-writers. Locke is searching for something -- but it has less to do with the desert around him and more to do with the desert inside.

After a day that ends in frustration when his Range Rover gets stuck in the sand, Locke returns to his hotel to find the man in the next room, another Englishman named Robertson, dead on his bed. In a flashback that presents this remarkably spare film's most expansive dialogue, we hear Robertson tell Locke that he is there on business; he also intimates that he has a weak heart.

Now Robertson is dead. In the following few minutes we watch a daring scenario take shape in Locke's mind: He will assume Roberstson's identity. Nobody in that godforsaken place will know the difference between two Western men who bear a resemblance to each other.

He drags Robertson into his own bed, then methodically transfers his passport photo into Robertson's passport, puts on Robertson's clothes, and assumes Robertson's life. "The gentleman in Number 11, he's dead," he tells the hotel-keeper. "His name was Locke, David Locke. He was a newspaperman, I think."

All he has to go on in this new life are some plane tickets and an appointment book he finds among Robertson's possessions. On the ticket jacket is written "Munich Box 58." The appointment book lists meetings in London, Munich and Barcelona.

So off we go to London -- vibrant, bustling, modern and chaotic, after the sere simplicity of North Africa, disorientingly lush in its colors and shapes and urban energies.

In London, Nicholson unsuccessfully waits for someone to contact him in the appointed park. Then he goes on to Munich, where Box 58 holds papers that reveal Robertson's "business": gun-running to the rebels. He also meets two men who are working for the rebels and who take the papers from him -- and who are subsequently ambushed by agents working for the government.

These government agents are not the only ones trying to find Roberston; Locke's wife and colleague are also looking for him, trying to resolve questions about Locke's death.

All the paths converge in Barcelona, where Nicholson, in a desperate attempt to evade his colleague, ducks into a Gaudi building, where he befriends a woman who closely resembles a woman he saw in the park in London. Is she too following him? Was she the one he was supposed to meet? It's not clear, but he enlists her aid to escape, and together he and she end up on a gorgeous drive through the Spanish countryside.

This flight in a convertible is one of the cinematic glories of the film, the camera lovingly capturing the lush green countryside and whitewashed hill towns of Spain. At one point Nicholson and Schneider stop in a chateau-like hotel perched elegantly above the fields, bathed in buttery, late-afternoon light. Another scene shows the convertible speeding along a country road that is bordered on both sides by green, overarching trees. That shot -- the speeding car, the green trees stretching behind as far as the eye can see -- that scene still embodies for me, 20 years later, all the wild freedom and allure of the open road.

And I can still remember, 20 years ago, thinking that I too would wake one day with Maria Schneider lying naked beside me in a splendid Spanish palace on top of a green hill.

Ultimately, the meaning and magnificence of "The Passenger" for me is the issues it raises -- issues of identity and destiny. As a lifelong wanderer, I empathize from the bottom of my soul with the picture of Jack Nicholson carefully razoring his photo out of his own passport and transferring it. I too have felt and still do feel the blessed anonymity that descends when you venture to someplace you have never been before, where no one knows you: the sudden exhilarating realization that anything is possible -- you can assume any identity, and around the corner you can meet someone who changes your life.

In his search for meaning, Locke falls into the clutches of Robertson's destiny -- but that didn't faze me 20 years ago, and it doesn't faze me today. How can we know our destiny? We can't, and so the only thing left is to make choices, to pursue this path or that, to follow whatever dream drives us on.

There are no doubt more magnificent travel films in the sheer photographic sense -- but to my mind "The Passenger" is the greatest travel film ever because of what it showed me 20 years ago and continues to show me today: the wild freedom and possibility at the heart of the traveler's life.

Or to put it another way: If we're all passengers on Destiny Road, we might as well make the drive in a convertible, through the green hills of Spain, with Maria Schneider by our side.
April 15, 1997

What's your favorite travel flick? Why? Tell all in Table Talk.

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Don George is the Editor of Wanderlust. You can email him at dgeorge@salonmagazine.com.

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