The most surprising chapter in the book is probably Chapter 3, “Adrift: The Freedom of the Female Hitchhiker.” It deals with the brief but intense cycle of exploitation films about young hitchhiking runaways roughly bracketed by The Young Runaways (Driefuss 1968) and the TV movie Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker (Post 1979) that consists of a mixture of mainstream studio films, exploitation pictures, drive-in movies, skin-flicks, and TV movies of the week that, together, fit Jeffrey Sconce’s category of “paracinema,” a category of film that includes entries from various subgenres of film including rock ‘n’ roll movies; movies about beatniks, hippies and dope; monster movies, surf films; hillbilly films, softcore porn and more. This seventies cycle focuses on the young female hitchhiker as an emblem of quasi-feminist independence and countercultural nonconformity, largely understood as sexual liberation, and the concomitant risks of – and punishments for – her freedom and mobility. They yoke female hitchhiking to not only transgressive sexuality and criminality but also freedom, stitching together anxieties related to the counterculture, voluntary precarity, runaway youth, and women’s liberation.Most discussions of late 1960s and early 1970s hitchhiking films focus on films like Easy Rider (Hopper 1969), Vanishing Point (Sarafian 1971), and Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman 1971). True, all of these include at least some attention to hitchhiking, but the focus of the films and the discourse around them tend to emphasize masculinist fantasies of freedom and existential crisis. In ignoring the female hitchhiking films, we not only fail to understand broader conceptions of the road and countercultural travel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but obscure—once again—both the reality and representations of female mobility. Similarly, when critics discuss youth cinema of the period, these films about young runaways and female hitchhikers are never mentioned, even in instances when critics seek to expand the conception of what “counts” as youth cinema. Largely viewed as a period lacking almost any youth film—save the nostalgic American Graffiti (Lucas 1973) set in the early 1960s—let alone films focused on girls, this critical lacuna about the early 1970s negates the place (or rather placelessness) of young countercultural women who were quite prominently represented, but who do not fit most conceptions of youth or youth film.The lack of attention to hitchhiking in film is not just a failure of the canon, but reflects a broader dismissal of hitchhiking as a largely forgotten fad. However, in both its practice and its filmic representation, hitchhiking represents a once-important cultural dominant that offers an alternate model of mobility and placelessness. Rather than only a means of getting from point A to point B, hitchhiking was, for a time, a crucial mode of travel and lifestyle for a generationally defined counterculture whose participants were mobile and deliberately unhomed.I hope that this book leads readers to see American film history differently, to recognize how much of American cinema grapples with mobility and placelessness, and also to consider the various discourses about homelessness, mobility, and placelessness that show deep cultural anxieties. I also hope this book leads people to watch less- or un-familiar films, such as the tramp films, Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913) or Girls of the Road (Grinde 1940); films about the veteran problem like In the Meantime, Darling (Preminger 1949) and Till the End of Time (Dymytryk 1946); films about hitchhiking like Ida Lupino’s noir The Hitch-Hiker (1953) or the surprisingly avant-garde TV movie Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring (Sargent 1971); films about the homeless like Times Square (Moyle 1980) or Sidewalk Stories (Lane 1989), or recent neo-realist films like Rahmin Bahrani’s films Chop Shop (2007) and Man Push Cart (2005). Ideally, they will return and re-examine such well-known films as tramp films featuring Chaplin’s Little Tramp or Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges 1941); post World War II films like The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler 1946); hitching films like Detour (Ulmer 1945); or homeless films like Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). Ideally, I’d like people to reflect on contemporary discourses and anxieties about the unhomed and unhoused, and resist efforts to demonize them.