Going Up the Country

As high summer sets the city a-simmer and the sweltering streets are perfumed with the scent of boiling garbage, New Yorkers with an alternate option on-hand stream out of the mephitic metropolis to take the country air. As for the rest of us, well, there’s always an air conditioned cinema, and movies that remind us that getting away from it all isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be, and that, as the saying goes: “Wherever you go, there you are.” With this series of eventful excursions (Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s People on Sunday), survivalist crucibles (Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, John Boorman’s Deliverance), and country cottage carouses (Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I), let Metrograph be your travel agent.