Highway flicks (enhanced)

[berberry]

We've had recent threads about highways in music and desert highways in music videos.  How 'bout highways that star in pictures?

Here's the "enhanced" part:  let's please limit this to pictures where a highway or group of highways become so much a part of the film's plot or atmosphere that the story would be very much different without it, not just movies that happen to contain a sequence or two taking place on a highway, like action sequences that could just as well have taken place in Brooklyn as Berkley (for instance).

Probably the first film of this type that pops to my mind is the old 1935 or so adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath starring Henry Fonda.  The picture is inconceivable without US 66, which almost becomes a character itself during the movie's most gut-wrenching sequences, as the family travels west in search of work.

The video I posted yesterday in the Desert Music Video thread features embedded homages to a few great films of the past as well as the one it was commissioned to promote:  MI-3.  One of them is Steve McQueen's Bullitt from '67, in which the streets of San Francisco very much become a character unto themselves.  That character of the streets is so strong that the story could not be told without it.

Another one I love is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the pic that inspired the long-running sitcom Alice.  Although it isn't quite as reliant on the highway as the other movies I mentioned, the highway sequence itself and the constant pull the highway has over Alice as she's tentatively getting herself settled in Phoenix is palpable, and thus the story would not be the same without the highway.

I can think of quite a few more, including much more recent pictures, but I'll wait to see if anyone else has anything to say.