Everyone has their favorite top road movie or travel-inspired film. Sabrina, Casablanca, the Mission Impossible films, A River Runs Through It are all great examples of these.
But there are also films that not only have amazing locations but literary roots as well. Travelers on hold can not only watch the film, but they can order or download the text of the book as well.
Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, (1985) was made on location in Kenya and the surrounding countryside. It is based on the 1937 book by Isak Dinesen. The book and the film are richly evocative of Nairobi in the years just before and after World War I.
Watching the film, you can enjoy a virtual tour of a movie recreation of the Karen Blixen Museum (currently closed during the Covid-19 pandemic) as well as areas in and around the Ngong Hills that look much as they did in Blixen’s day.
If you’ve always dreamed of a journey to North Africa, try a trippy vintage 1950s virtual vacation with the Debra Winger and John Malkovitch in The Sheltering Sky (1990). Shot on location throughout Morocco, the movie is a filmed version of the 1949 book, The Sheltering Sky, written in 1949 by Paul Bowles.
Bowles book was hugely influential on the burgeoning beatnik culture of expat travelers like Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the early 1950s. Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually stunning film was not critically well received, but as travelogue and vintage fashion show it’s worth the trip (trigger alert: scenes of illness at the end of the film).
From the desert to the green fields of England, travelers with a literary bent can do no better than to delve into Jane Austen’s world on Netflix and Amazon and in their own home library.
Sense and Sensibility (1995) is a classic take on Austen’s book featuring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslett and a very dashing Alan Rickman as the much beloved, Colonel Brandon. The film was shot on location in North Devon and at Syon House.
Other classic film version of Austen include the Colin Firth TV version of Pride and Prejudice as well as the 2005 Keira Knightley version, filmed on location in and around Chatworth House.
James Ivory (director) and Ismail Merchant (producer) are the team behind movie versions of E.M. Forster’s books Howard’s End, Maurice and A Room With A View where armchair time travelers can experience Forster’s 1900’s era Britain and a ravishing Florence (Room With A View).
