Director: Monte Hellman

Stars: James Taylor (of "Fire and Rain"), Dennis Wilson (Beach Boy drummer), Laurie Bird, Warren Oates

Four stars out of five

When Two-Lane Blacktop was released, Esquire proclaimed it Movie of the Year, featured a photo representing the film on the cover, and printed the screenplay inside.  The hype was at once publicity boon and curse. I don't think it did well in the theaters but over the years it became a cult movie.  I saw it when it came out, liked it, but found it a little empty.  Nonetheless, it was haunting and it stuck with me.  A second viewing 39 years later has not changed my view greatly, though I better appreciate the purpose of the film's bleakness.

Taylor and Wilson are the driver and mechanic, respectively, of a gray-primered 1955 Chevrolet built for drag racing: 454, dual quads on a hi-rise manifold, headers....  They travel across the country and make a living, of sorts, by challenging people to races – usually illegal ones – and betting a few hundred dollars.  They do not show any exhilaration or joy from winning; they just count the cash.  We don't learn anything about their lives, pasts, or motivations nor do we even know their names.  Each gives a fine performance, though neither is asked to show any dramatic range.  Taylor conveys brooding if not menacing intensity quite well.

The film parallels Easy Rider in that it follows two people on their travel from west to east – a reversal of the movement in the traditional western – and occasional interactions with rural, traditional people along Route 66.  No horses; just powerful motor vehicles.  Both have several scenes in New Mexico.  Two-Lane Blacktop has excellent cinematography, including scenes in Santa Fe (The La Fonda inn) and near Tucumcari.  Easy Rider uses Taos, I believe.

Two-Lane Blacktop points to a bleak, nihilistic stratum of youth culture of the period – one which I recall well but which gets glossed over in romantic depictions of the time.  Continuing the Easy Rider comparison, they might be intended to elicit comparisons to Wyatt and Billy, or to Kerouac and Cassady from On the Road.  These characters were far from idealistic, but they were looking for meaning – or at least Fonda's character and Kerouac were.  The pair in Two-Lane Blacktop think only of getting fast food, keeping the engine in top form, and finding a race in the next town – the winnings from which let them go on.  One wonders what they might do if they lost.  They might be intended to elicit thoughts of Perry and Dick from In Cold Blood.

Along the way, they encounter two characters.  A young hippie hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) rides along for a while with little meaningful interaction with any of the characters, though there are awkward, intermittent efforts at personal contact and Taylor's character develops an obsession for her.  The other is a middle-aged man with a powerful new GTO (Warren Oates).  Oates picks up hitchhikers and tells them various stories about his work and how he got his car.  They sound like they might have been intros to sales pitches in his work. He has a wide assortment of music cassettes but has no particular interest in any of them.  He is a different sort of nihilistic rootlessness – an "other-directed" American escaping a failed past and drifting from one fantasy to the other.  The pair and he agree to race to Washington DC, with the party that gets there first winning the other's car.  They're racing for "pinks." 

The contest soon enough falls away and the three just come across each other occasionally, eat and talk a bit, and even swap cars for a while.  Two small scenes of a fatal crash (possibly caused by the GTO) and an elderly woman visiting a cemetery portend what might be ahead.  The ending suggests meaninglessness and burnout – perhaps where the filmmaker thought the 60s had brought us.

© 2010 Brian M Downing

Brian M Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam.  He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.