ShangLuda Admirable film.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Jim-499 I just finished watching the entire series in chronological order. It took me almost two years to the day to watch them. I bought the first three seasons on DVD one season at a time. Season 4 was not available on DVD unless you bought Route 66 The Complete Series but they did not make the entire series available until after I bought the first three seasons on DVD.BUT, MeTV was showing the entire series in chronological order so I just waited until the fourth season started.Within the last hour I watched the final episode. Is was part 2 of 2.Route 66 ran from fall 1960 to spring 1964. The premise of the series was Tod Stiles father passed away who owned a large business but was in tremendous debt. So his business had to be liquidated and sold. By the time all his debt and creditors were paid off, all his recent Yale graduate son (Tod Stiles) inherited was a brand new Corvette.One of the guys that worked for his father was an orphan raised in the tough streets of Hell's Kitchen named Buzz Murdoch, who had to learn to fight in one of the worst crime-ridden areas in the country just to survive.The two of them decided to take to the road and see the country in the new 1961 Corvette.The first two seasons were very good.At the end of the second season and at the end of the third season, George Maharis (Buzz Murdoch) missed several episodes. He was replaced at the end of the 3rd season with Lincoln Case (Glenn Corbett), a Green Beret/Vietnam Vet.As a whole, by the third season, the stories some times had little to do with the main characters; they were some times incidental characters in the stories.And the Lincoln Case character was not that well defined. They started off defining him well--a Green Beret that when attacked by four hoodlums, sends them all to hospital. Tod Stiles takes umbrage at this, thinking these hoodlums semi-innocent teenagers and challenges Case to a fight. Case agrees not to use his karate so they fight to a stand still. In fact, Case never uses his karate skills throughout the rest of the series taking away what could have been a character-defining gritty toughness.By contrast, Buzz Murdoch had his tough street-fighter side that defined him and made him interesting with a razor-sharp temper.Some of these episodes in the fourth season —and even the third--I had to suffer through. The music was sometimes contrived and corny, tried to make me feel differently than what the screen conveyed and oft times there were unrealistic characters that I could also care less about. And unrealistic dialog where one character goes on a poetic monologue.In the final episode reality was transcended: A character played by Patrick O'Neal dies and it's a joke with no investigation, no sorrow.A lot of these old shows did not have a definitive ending, perhaps because they did not know they were going to be canceled, one of the exceptions being "The Fugitive." But the final episode of Route 66 DID have an end to the series: Tod Stiles gets married (to Barbara Eden), Linc Case ships his stuff back home to Texas and when Stiles says, "Well we're going that way, straight to Houston" Case replies, "That's a two-seater you've got there old buddy."Case walks out to the Corvette, puts Stiles and Eden's luggage in the car, looks the Corvette over one last time, rubs his hands on it, smiles in reminiscing fashion then walks away into the sunset with the Corvette in the foreground and one final musical phrase of the Nelson Riddle/Gil Grau Route 66 theme song. Lincoln Case is saying goodbye to the road.The character most prevalent in this final scene of the series before it fades is the character most prevalent in the series—the Corvette. Fade Out.For the end credits, whilst the Nelson Riddle theme song played, Route 66 always showed a still from a scene from the episode. In this case it was the final shot of the episode/series—the Corvette but this time without Lincoln Case in the scene.The four year road trip had come to an end.Too bad they couldn't get a cameo by Maharis in the final episode.PS MeTV started Route 66 over with the first episode. Just for the heck of it I watched it again. The contrast in tension, character development and writing in watching the final episode immediately followed by the first was like night and day. Those early episodes were so much better.Executive Summary: First two seasons very good (inspired me to look up Maharis' work after Route 66). Third and fourth season hit and miss with the fourth season mostly miss even though I liked GLenn Corbett as an actor. He just did not get that many good scripts.

Joseph Harder Sterling Silliphant created two television series that should live forever, or at least until we have a nuclear war or a meteor hits us. The first was The Naked City, the first truly great Noir Police Procedural,which fashioned the template for almost every great Cop show that followed. The other had few imitators ( Mving On, Banyon, even , God save us, BJ and the Bear.). It was ,of course, Route 66. I had heard of this show for years, and finally caught many of the episodes from the first season on our local RetroTV affiliate. I know realize that it deserves its Iconic status. All I had known about it was that it had an unforgettable theme( NOT to be confused with the classic song by Bobby ( Emergency) Troup.)and a snazzy Red Corvette. I also knew that Martin Milner had starred in before he starred in Adam-12. After watching an episode, in which Lew Ayres played a Nazi-Hunter who meets our heroes on an oil derrick in Louisiana, I was hooked. The local Retro affiliate ran the show every day at Seven O'clock in the morning, right after The Cisco Kid. Forsaking Don Imus and Joe Scarboough, I watched almost every episode for about five weeks. With one or two exceptions, almost every episode was good, and at least seven were superb. I was especially impressed by "Ministering Angels", "Fly Away Home', "Two Drops of Water", "Play it Glissando", and an episode were Darren McGavin played a prize fighter. Perhaps it helped that I had just read On the Road for the first time. The show was well acted, and often poetic. Then, one morning, I learned that the Local station that ran it and other classic TV shows was switching to , God help us, a "life-style " format. Well, maybe, I 'll move to some city which still has its Rero station. Of course, by the time that happens, I'll be too old to enjoy it. We really need more networks like Retro, that rerun the great shows of all time.

JAtheDJ I've just seen several episodes of Route 66, which I remember from reruns in the late 60's. The location shots are absolutely wonderful - how Martin Milner and George Maharis survived all the travel to shoot on location is amazing in itself.The story lines deal with people and their personal lives in a very intimate way. Wonderful "guest stars" too - from Robert Redford and Robert Duvall to Walter Matthau and Jack Lord.I grew to appreciate Milner and Maharis from earlier parts they played -Milner as the stoic, sincere jazz guitarist in "Sweet Smell of Success," in 1957 and Maharis in the first hour-long episode of Naked City in 1960. My kind of actors.All in all, Route 66 is a great show.

ruffrider It was 1960, when the country was far less crowded and open roads beckoned just outside the cities. This was before the country lost its innocence via Vietnam and Watergate, a time when the rest of the world bought our manufactured goods and America had saved the world from Hitler and fascism within recent memory. Cynicism and paranoia hadn't yet taken hold, many people would actually stop to help if your car broke down on the highway and altruism was a viable concept on TV and in real life. Into this world rode 2 young guys in a Corvette convertible (Corvettes were still somewhat exotic at the time), who met unusual people everywhere they went, which was all over the USA and even Canada. The two young men were total opposites, who made a fascinating personality clash and a winning pair of adventurers and Good Samaritans. Dark-haired Buz Murdock (played by George Maharis) was the brooder and battler with street smarts, who spoke like the hep-cat and jazz buff he was, while sophisticated, red-haired Yale grad Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) quoted literature and poetry, charmed the ladies and handled his share of the bullies. Sometimes the two boys were the center of the stories, other times just onlookers.The dramatic, socially-conscious scripts met the tough issues head-on, from runaway kids and juvenile delinquency (this was long before young kids routinely carried guns to school) to substance abuse, terrorism and mercy killing. The quality of the scripts demanded high-powered acting, which it got from its stars Maharis and Milner and the impressive list of guest stars, including Rob't Duvall, Rob't Redford, Lee Marvin, Ed Asner, Martin Balsam, Alan Alda, Janice Rule and Jack Warden, to name only a few."Route 66" was so progressive socially because its producer (Herbert Leonard) allowed his chief writer (Stirling Silliphant) to tackle just about any subject he wanted, with no interference from the network or sponsors - a very unusual situation, even in 1960. There are so many out-of-the-ordinary elements in this show it's hard to list them all and in retrospect it seems like a kind of avant-garde television, with 100% location filming, travelogue, adventure and even a sort of Playhouse-90-like dramatic quality, all rolled into one. Perhaps the show's most striking element was the remarkable dialog, usually relegated to the guest actors, which often took the form of meditations on life or the ruminations of demoralized characters forced to confront their demons. This dialog can be seen today as nothing less than brilliant free-verse poetry, into which (future Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter) Silliphant poured his deepest thoughts. Looking back it seems remarkable such a show was ever made at all. Having written a book on this program, I've come to know "Route 66" quite well and feel privileged to have watched it.