The point made at the centre of this beguiling documentary is that various studies conducted in America have found hitchhiking to be statistically no more dangerous than any other activity. A fact lent further credence through the same conclusion having been reached in similar research by Germans. This may come as a surprise to many as the horror stories surrounding hitchhiking are deeply embedded in our collective memory. THE FOREST PRINCE AND THE PIGMAN reminds us however that this is due to the prevalence of vague, often salacious, blood-thirsty second-hand anecdotes rather than from the bank of our own personal experience.
Director Craig Constantine (producer of TV’s Ice Road Truckers) uses the device of following a guitar-wielding, behatted young man as he thumbs his way across the United States, east to west, meeting and sharing road-time with a frequently amusing random sample of American society. During the course of his adventure we are shown just how safe and rewarding hitchhiking can be, either as a practical necessity born of desperation, simple gap-year-style wanderlust or indeed as a chosen lifestyle.
As a companion thread to the young wanderer’s narrative, we receive an education in the history of hitchhiking in America via a well-researched selection of archive photographs, footage and reports. We are shown the country’s shifting, conflicted attitude to it from its modern genesis as a means of getting from A to B, which came with the invention of the motorcar at the turn of the last century, through to the present day. Many states by turns tried to ban or restrict hitchhiking over the decades – often against a backdrop of McCarthyist false-hype propaganda and news media scaremongering – or endorse it as a means to economise in times of war, which serves to demonstrate that the notion of giving or receiving a lift has forever been dogged by misinformation and strong emotional response.
A simple story told well, the film is marred only by the strong cheese of a deep-voiced Discovery channel-style narrator who talks over the academic content, which grates rather and spoils the delicate and vaguely dream-like atmosphere that pervades the piece. The film closes with a young woman cheerily telling us that, despite a widely-reported story about a hitchhiking girl having her arms amputated with an axe by a maniac truck driver in the 1970s, she would happily share the same fate today as her mind-expanding experiences travelling the world by thumb have made it all wholly worthwhile.
THE STRANGER is a mildly perplexing but generally satisfactory short that trails a young man of indeterminate intention as he steals a powder blue suit, gatecrashes a party and while there elects to answer the phone and speak to the home-owner’s mother about a sick grandmother, claiming a cold has modified his voice beyond recognition. We follow him; a stranger in a crowd of friends but not yet lonely, free from social burden to please himself and, despite a mild case of kleptomania, seemingly of harm to no-one. Indeed, in the end, there may be one who is especially grateful for the presence of this inscrutable interloper.
