Car Breakdowns in Movies
It’s never going to be an easy thing. Even in today’s day and age, with advances in communications technologies, a breakdown on a trip is not fun. It is very different, however, now that it’s not such a threatening experience to be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Remote regions often have signal, and gps has done wonders for keeping people on the beaten path. But it does happen, and not everyone wants or needs automatic roadside assistance, and can take care of things with a little foresight, and an oldsmobile online repair manual. But everyone who has been in the situation more than once can tell a story or two that are more than a little cinematic.
Not everyone is going to have an experience that is worthy of another “It Happened One Night,” 
where the lead characters fall in love for the very first time. Not everyone is so lucky. Even more, very rarely are they lucky enough to be traveling with Clark Gable or Claudette Colbert. But just as the actors in a film are meant to stand in for the people in the audience, personal experiences with being stuck on the side of the road come to stand in for larger metaphors in the world. That is the great appeal about those scenes, in fact, where the leads are stuck somewhere between places. It’s not a coincidence that they can serve to remind the viewer of a time when they were stuck, and at the same time serve as a dramatic suggestion that the characters in the film are lost.
Being lost in a film is different than in real life, of course. If the film is memorable at all, it won’t be as boring as a real experience can be, in part because in film there are no Haynes manuals online to get the characters out of the situation. When the leads are lost, like in the “Sure Thing,” they are forced to do things that are heroic or extraordinary. The Cusack character pretends he is crazy, recalling his previous goofiness and turning it into an asset so that we can accept the Zuniga character’s falling for him. Colbert shows a little leg, which literally stops traffic and sets up the attraction. In both of these actions, the characters are revealing themselves in very significant ways, demonstrating through action what they are capable of. When people off screen are stuck, there are more methods that may seem a little less heroic, but perhaps in the larger picture they do amount to the very same things.