Sad Places: Catch Us If You Can

This article discusses John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can (1965) as a relative rarity, namely a British road movie. One of the distinctive features of films in this genre is the representation of the landscapes through which their characters move – in this case from London to Burgh Island in Devon. What is particularly notable about the landscapes, rural and urban, on this journey is that they are not glamorised or represented in the terms of what later would be come to be called the heritage industry. The fact that the film was made in the depths of winter is obviously a factor here – just as it was in Radio On (1979) – but, for example, the scenes set in the abandoned village of Imber on Salisbury plain are bleak by any standard, and determinedly anti-pastoral. The article does discuss other aspects too of Catch Us If You Can, and in particular the context of its production, in order to understand how the first-time feature film-maker John Boorman had the opportunity to make such an unusual and distinctive ‘youth movie’.