General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Kings of the Road

Kings of the Road (German: Im Lauf der Zeit, literally "In the Course of Time") is a 1976 West German road film directed, written, and produced by Wim Wenders, following a traveling film-projector repairman and a despondent psychologist who journey together along the border between East and West Germany¹. It is the third and final entry in Wenders' informal Road Movie Trilogy, after Alice in the Cities (1974) and Wrong Move (1975)², and it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival³.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Im Lauf der Zeit ("In the Course of Time")²
Director, writer, producer	Wim Wenders; production by Wim Wenders Produktion with Westdeutscher Rundfunk¹
Lead actors	Rüdiger Vogler as Bruno Winter, a projector repairman; Hanns Zischler as Robert Lander, a psychologist⁴
Format	Black-and-white 35mm, aspect ratio 1.66:1, German language⁵
Running time	176 minutes per Criterion and BFI; filmportal lists 175 minutes and Encyclopedia.com lists 165 minutes⁵^•²^•⁶
Release	World premiere 2 February 1976 at the Rotterdam IFF; German theatrical release 4 March 1976²
Award	FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Film Festival 1976³
Cinematography	Robby Müller, with Martin Schäfer as assistant camera¹

Spoilers

Story

Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) repairs film projectors in the small-town cinemas along the inner-German border, traveling in a converted moving van he also camps in⁴^•⁷. Early in the film he watches Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) drive his old Volkswagen straight into the Elbe River and fishes him out⁴. Robert, a child psychologist who has separated from his wife and left her in Genoa, is fleeing his own past; he telephones her repeatedly, apparently to reassure himself that she has not committed suicide⁷.

The two men travel together from the Lüneburg Heath to the Bavarian Forest, stopping at one rural cinema after another where Bruno services the equipment⁴. They meet people on the fringes of German society, including a cinema owner (Franziska Stömmer) who explains why she is closing the theater her father fought to keep open, saying that under current conditions "it's better to have no theatre"⁸. Both men revisit their childhood homes: Bruno returns to the island where he grew up with his mother, and Robert visits his father, a publisher who single-handedly runs a dying provincial newspaper⁹. By the end of the journey they part ways, having derived some comfort from the fact that, in the course of time, their lives have taken on shape and significance².

Themes

The film links the two men's personal journeys to the state of 1970s Germany. As the cinemas Bruno visits close one by one, the film mourns the passing of cinema as a mass medium; the old moving van carrying the projectors becomes a metaphor for the history of film, which is why the film is dedicated to the director Fritz Lang⁴. Television ownership had reached a critical mass in the villages along the eastern border of West Germany, and the local independent theaters, no longer holding a monopoly on visual entertainment, were on their last legs⁸.

Americanization. The film also addresses the cultural dominance of the United States in postwar Germany. In the film's most quoted line, Bruno tells Robert: "The Yankees have colonized our subconscious"⁴. Critics have read the film as a Hawksian bond between two men tested against tedium and cultural deterioration, in a Germany that had become, in David Thomson's phrase, a satellite of Americana⁹. Wenders himself described it as a film about men totally in the American road-movie tradition, and at the same time the opposite of those films in how it treats its male characters¹⁰.

The film's bleak black-and-white imagery of desolate, flat landscape depicts a kind of no-man's-land along the border, intensifying the sense of individual and collective identity loss experienced by both protagonists¹¹. Wenders summarized the film as "the story of the absence of women, which is at the same time the story of the longing for them to be present"².

Production

Wenders began the film without a script. Instead there was a route he had scouted beforehand, through the little towns along the border that still contained a movie theater in what Janus Films calls an era of cinematic mass extinction⁴. Filming took place from July to October 1975 along a route with over eighty cinemas between Lüneburg and Passau, with scenes devised late at night by Wenders, Vogler, Zischler, cameraman Robby Müller, and assistant director Martin Hennig before shooting began in a new location the next morning⁸. Wenders recalled the method's cost: "At night, in some village hotel room, I would sometimes be overcome with terror... I still had no idea what we'd be shooting in the morning"¹².

The English-language title derives from a nickname Robert gives to Bruno ("I thought the King of the Road wasn't interested in stories"), itself a reference to Roger Miller's 1964 song "King of the Road," which Bruno sings along to toward the end of the film⁸. Songs played on Bruno's portable record player include Chris Montez's "The More I See You" (1966), Heinz's "Just Like Eddie" (1963), and Roger Miller's "King of the Road" (1965)¹. The score was composed by Axel Linstädt and performed by the Nuremberg band Improved Sound Limited¹.

Style and reception

Robby Müller's black-and-white photography has drawn repeated comparison to John Ford; Roger Ebert called it "worthy of comparison with John Ford's," and the Guardian's Richard Roud wrote that the film has "just those qualities that Wenders admires so much in John Ford"¹³^•⁷. The Harvard Film Archive notes that Müller's style in the Road Trilogy is indebted to Depression-era American photojournalists such as Robert Frank and Walker Evans as well as to painters like Edward Hopper and Caspar David Friedrich¹⁴.

The film was one of Ebert's ten best of 1978¹³. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called it "the first masterpiece of the New German Cinema"¹⁵, and David Thomson, in A Biographical Dictionary of Film, wrote that "Kings of the Road is one of the best films of the seventies"⁹. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100% Tomatometer from 7 reviews and an 87% audience score from more than 500 ratings¹⁶.

Restoration and home video

In 2014, ARRI Film & TV Services Berlin carried out a digital restoration, scanning the original negative at 4K resolution, retouching it, and correcting the color grading¹. The Criterion Collection issued the restored film as Spine #816 with a director-approved special edition, including a German-language audio commentary by Wenders, outtakes, and new interviews with Vogler, Zischler, and Lisa Kreuzer; it is also available in the box set Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy⁵.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026