Ten (sixteen, actually) Reasons I Love
Two-Lane Blacktop
By Richard Linklater01 Because it’s the purest American road movie ever.
02 Because it’s like a drive-in movie directed by a French new wave director.
03 Because the only thing that can get between a boy and his car obsession is a girl, and Laurie Bird perfectly messes up the oneness between the Driver, the Mechanic, and their car.
04 Because Dennis Wilson gives the greatest performance ever . . . by a drummer.
05 Because James Taylor seems like a refugee from a Robert Bresson movie, and has the chiseled looks of Artaud from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
06 Because there was once a god who walked the earth named Warren Oates.
07 Because there’s a continuing controversy over who is the actual lead in this movie. There are different camps. Some say it’s the ’55 Chevy, some say it’s the GTO. But I’m Goat man, I have a GTO—’68.
08 Because it has the most purely cinematic ending in film history.
09 Because it’s like a western. The guys are like old-time gunfighters, ready to outdraw the quickest gun in town. And they don’t talk about the old flames they’ve had, but rather old cars they’ve had.
10 Because Warren Oates has a different cashmere sweater for every occasion. And of course the wet bar in the trunk.
11 Because unlike other films of the era, with the designer alienation of the drug culture and the war protesters, this movie is about the alienation of everybody else, like Robert Frank’s The Americans come alive.
12 Because Warren Oates, as GTO, orders a hamburger and an Alka-Seltzer and says things like “Everything is going too fast and not fast enough.”
13 Because it’s both the last film of the sixties—even though it came out in ’71—and also the first film of the seventies. You know, that great era of “How the hell did they ever get that film made at a studio?/Hollywood would never do that today” type of films.
14 Because engines have never sounded better in a movie.
15 Because these two young men on their trip to nowhere don’t really know how to talk. The Driver doesn’t really converse when he’s behind the wheel, and the Mechanic doesn’t really talk when he’s working on the car. So this is primarily a visual, atmospheric experience. To watch this movie correctly is to become absorbed into it.
16 And, above all else, because Two-Lane Blacktop goes all the way with its idea. And that’s a rare thing in this world: a completely honest movie.
Filmmaker Richard Linklater originally presented this tribute at the 2000 South by Southwest in Austin, TX, as an introduction to a special screening of Two-Lane Blacktop, part of a retrospective of Hellman's work that Linklater helped coordinate.
Review by Michael Jacobson
Two-Lane Blacktop could be considered the Easy Rider of the 70s, but with a few marked differences. Whereas the classic biker film by Dennis Hopper captured and reflected a certain spirit of freedom and rebellion inherent in its decade, Monte Hellman’s road race film treats its subjects as almost alien, lost souls. The characters have miles and miles of open road to call their home, yet the movie doesn’t sing an ode to freedom. These people are trapped and isolated, and don’t really seem to understand it.
For starters, none of the characters in the film even have names. They are simply known as the driver (Taylor), the mechanic (Wilson), the girl (Bird) and the GTO (Oates). The driver and the mechanic travel in a souped up 55 Chevy. When they speak to one another, it’s entirely the language of automobiles. They make their money scoping out races. They have no past. They have no future.
The movie seems to have settled instinctively on the one interesting chapter in their lives, and it involves two other lonely, detached individuals. The first is the girl, who simply climbs into the back of their car while the pair are having breakfast. They get back in the car without saying a word to her. Likewise, she doesn’t speak. They drive off as though fated to be together. Finally, somewhere along the road, she asks, “Where are we headed?” “East,” the mechanic replies. “Cool,” she agrees. “I’ve never been east.”
The other character is the GTO, so named because he drives a slick new Pontiac GTO. The two cars encounter one another many times along the road, each driver wondering if the other is making a challenge. Like the driver and mechanic, the GTO has no real past or future. He picks up a few hitchhikers along the way, and spins a different life story to each one. One of his passengers falls asleep, and the GTO repeats the story he’d been telling the fellow verbatim.
Eventually, the characters meet up, and the race is on. The GTO picks Washington D.C. as the finish line. Why so far, we wonder? Couldn’t a simple drag race down a deserted road accomplish the same results? But when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do, you find something to occupy your time.
The race proceeds in ways that are both fascinating, and sometimes a little humorous. Even though their respective cars are on the line, they still find time to meet up and share a drink or snack from the back of their cars. Which sort of lends to the film’s theme about being trapped rather than being free. These characters’ world is not the endless stretch of highway, but their cars. Nothing changes for either of them no matter where they go. Their microcosm of existence simply goes along with them.
Note even how the blossoming but ultimately failing romance between the driver and the girl play out. Their most tender scene involves the driver trying to teach the girl how to use the stick shift (an obvious innuendo). Her failure to get it right, or his failure to show her properly, is quite symbolic. Later in the film, when it’s clear she’s going to take off, his bumbling attempt at some kind of proposal is simply that he wants her to go with him to Columbus, where he can get some good auto parts cheap. It’s as sad as it is funny.
And the GTO complains about his passengers: “Just one fantasy after another”, he calls them. Whose fantasy? His or theirs? An interesting question considering how he manages a different life story each time around. He sadly remarks to the girl at one point, “If I don’t get grounded soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.” But grounding for any of these characters is not to be. At the end of the picture, he picks up a couple of young soldiers, and begins to tell the tale about how he used his older Chevy in a race to beat a couple of young punks driving a GTO. Considering the three men are riding in that GTO, the soldiers are as bewildered as we are.
By chance or by fate, both cars have a separate encounter with death along their journey. The driver and mechanic, while playing a little road rage game with another driver, come across a lethal accident in the middle of a road. A man lies dead. The driver of an overturned truck, obviously shaken, describes the dead man as having played the same kind of game the two leads were just engaged in. Meanwhile, the GTO picks up an old woman and her granddaughter, who are going to the cemetery where the younger girl’s parents have just been laid to rest. “A city car,” the old woman says quietly. “It was a city car that killed them.”
The film’s final shot is somewhat famous. The driver, engaged in yet another quick race to make some cash, sits behind the wheel. We begin to notice that the images are slowing down. The soundtrack reduces itself to silence. The signal is given, the cars take off. We watch from the rear seat, looking at the back of the driver’s head and the open road ahead. The film gets slower and slower, until it freezes and burns in the projector. Who won the big race? We don’t know. What does this ending signify? The driver’s death? Possibly…or maybe just the suggestion that these characters are living in a kind of death as it is. They were told earlier on that they can’t live that kind of life forever. Yet they don’t seem to have anything else.
Monte Hellman, another one of Roger Corman’s protégés, created a symbolic and entrancing road movie with Two-Lane Blacktop. His mastery as a director shows in the way he cultivates his images and relies on them more than the dialogue to convey his story and expose his characters. I’ve already mentioned comparisons to Easy Rider and my opinion that this movie represents the imprisonment of that lifestyle rather than the freedom of it. This comes across through Hellman’s filming. Hopper moved his camera in and out and around his bikes effortlessly. There was a sense of unlimited space and complete lack of rules. Hellman’s characters take a similar journey across America, but we always see the world from the point of view of inside the car. When we’re outside the car, we’re looking in at them. It doesn’t even matter what the outside world is. Their world is encased in glass and steel, and anything outside of it barely exists.
Hellman claims he cast James Taylor for the role of the driver after seeing his picture on a billboard. Taylor’s music career was just beginning to take off, but he agreed to test for and appear in this picture. I admit, I chuckled when I saw his name on the box, but I have to admit, he was right for the role. He plays the driver with a quiet kind of intensity, and maintains a believable sense of being lost when it comes to communicating outside the world of the automobile. Equally good is the late Dennis Wilson, who was most famous for being the Beach Boys’ drummer, but strikes a good casual note as the man who’s so in tune with the car that he makes statements like, “It’s not breathing right.”
Warren Oates, however, is a true standout as the GTO. He brings all the right notes to this character, from the loneliness to the silly smugness. This could have easily been just another caricature in a road movie, but he manages to bring out the humor and the sadness, and find just the right amount of truth in a character that, as he puts it, is so ungrounded.
Two-Lane Blacktop
By Richard Linklater01 Because it’s the purest American road movie ever.
02 Because it’s like a drive-in movie directed by a French new wave director.
03 Because the only thing that can get between a boy and his car obsession is a girl, and Laurie Bird perfectly messes up the oneness between the Driver, the Mechanic, and their car.
04 Because Dennis Wilson gives the greatest performance ever . . . by a drummer.
05 Because James Taylor seems like a refugee from a Robert Bresson movie, and has the chiseled looks of Artaud from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
06 Because there was once a god who walked the earth named Warren Oates.
07 Because there’s a continuing controversy over who is the actual lead in this movie. There are different camps. Some say it’s the ’55 Chevy, some say it’s the GTO. But I’m Goat man, I have a GTO—’68.
08 Because it has the most purely cinematic ending in film history.
09 Because it’s like a western. The guys are like old-time gunfighters, ready to outdraw the quickest gun in town. And they don’t talk about the old flames they’ve had, but rather old cars they’ve had.
10 Because Warren Oates has a different cashmere sweater for every occasion. And of course the wet bar in the trunk.
11 Because unlike other films of the era, with the designer alienation of the drug culture and the war protesters, this movie is about the alienation of everybody else, like Robert Frank’s The Americans come alive.
12 Because Warren Oates, as GTO, orders a hamburger and an Alka-Seltzer and says things like “Everything is going too fast and not fast enough.”
13 Because it’s both the last film of the sixties—even though it came out in ’71—and also the first film of the seventies. You know, that great era of “How the hell did they ever get that film made at a studio?/Hollywood would never do that today” type of films.
14 Because engines have never sounded better in a movie.
15 Because these two young men on their trip to nowhere don’t really know how to talk. The Driver doesn’t really converse when he’s behind the wheel, and the Mechanic doesn’t really talk when he’s working on the car. So this is primarily a visual, atmospheric experience. To watch this movie correctly is to become absorbed into it.
16 And, above all else, because Two-Lane Blacktop goes all the way with its idea. And that’s a rare thing in this world: a completely honest movie.
Filmmaker Richard Linklater originally presented this tribute at the 2000 South by Southwest in Austin, TX, as an introduction to a special screening of Two-Lane Blacktop, part of a retrospective of Hellman's work that Linklater helped coordinate.
Review by Michael Jacobson
Two-Lane Blacktop could be considered the Easy Rider of the 70s, but with a few marked differences. Whereas the classic biker film by Dennis Hopper captured and reflected a certain spirit of freedom and rebellion inherent in its decade, Monte Hellman’s road race film treats its subjects as almost alien, lost souls. The characters have miles and miles of open road to call their home, yet the movie doesn’t sing an ode to freedom. These people are trapped and isolated, and don’t really seem to understand it.
For starters, none of the characters in the film even have names. They are simply known as the driver (Taylor), the mechanic (Wilson), the girl (Bird) and the GTO (Oates). The driver and the mechanic travel in a souped up 55 Chevy. When they speak to one another, it’s entirely the language of automobiles. They make their money scoping out races. They have no past. They have no future.
The movie seems to have settled instinctively on the one interesting chapter in their lives, and it involves two other lonely, detached individuals. The first is the girl, who simply climbs into the back of their car while the pair are having breakfast. They get back in the car without saying a word to her. Likewise, she doesn’t speak. They drive off as though fated to be together. Finally, somewhere along the road, she asks, “Where are we headed?” “East,” the mechanic replies. “Cool,” she agrees. “I’ve never been east.”
The other character is the GTO, so named because he drives a slick new Pontiac GTO. The two cars encounter one another many times along the road, each driver wondering if the other is making a challenge. Like the driver and mechanic, the GTO has no real past or future. He picks up a few hitchhikers along the way, and spins a different life story to each one. One of his passengers falls asleep, and the GTO repeats the story he’d been telling the fellow verbatim.
Eventually, the characters meet up, and the race is on. The GTO picks Washington D.C. as the finish line. Why so far, we wonder? Couldn’t a simple drag race down a deserted road accomplish the same results? But when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do, you find something to occupy your time.
The race proceeds in ways that are both fascinating, and sometimes a little humorous. Even though their respective cars are on the line, they still find time to meet up and share a drink or snack from the back of their cars. Which sort of lends to the film’s theme about being trapped rather than being free. These characters’ world is not the endless stretch of highway, but their cars. Nothing changes for either of them no matter where they go. Their microcosm of existence simply goes along with them.
Note even how the blossoming but ultimately failing romance between the driver and the girl play out. Their most tender scene involves the driver trying to teach the girl how to use the stick shift (an obvious innuendo). Her failure to get it right, or his failure to show her properly, is quite symbolic. Later in the film, when it’s clear she’s going to take off, his bumbling attempt at some kind of proposal is simply that he wants her to go with him to Columbus, where he can get some good auto parts cheap. It’s as sad as it is funny.
And the GTO complains about his passengers: “Just one fantasy after another”, he calls them. Whose fantasy? His or theirs? An interesting question considering how he manages a different life story each time around. He sadly remarks to the girl at one point, “If I don’t get grounded soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.” But grounding for any of these characters is not to be. At the end of the picture, he picks up a couple of young soldiers, and begins to tell the tale about how he used his older Chevy in a race to beat a couple of young punks driving a GTO. Considering the three men are riding in that GTO, the soldiers are as bewildered as we are.
By chance or by fate, both cars have a separate encounter with death along their journey. The driver and mechanic, while playing a little road rage game with another driver, come across a lethal accident in the middle of a road. A man lies dead. The driver of an overturned truck, obviously shaken, describes the dead man as having played the same kind of game the two leads were just engaged in. Meanwhile, the GTO picks up an old woman and her granddaughter, who are going to the cemetery where the younger girl’s parents have just been laid to rest. “A city car,” the old woman says quietly. “It was a city car that killed them.”
The film’s final shot is somewhat famous. The driver, engaged in yet another quick race to make some cash, sits behind the wheel. We begin to notice that the images are slowing down. The soundtrack reduces itself to silence. The signal is given, the cars take off. We watch from the rear seat, looking at the back of the driver’s head and the open road ahead. The film gets slower and slower, until it freezes and burns in the projector. Who won the big race? We don’t know. What does this ending signify? The driver’s death? Possibly…or maybe just the suggestion that these characters are living in a kind of death as it is. They were told earlier on that they can’t live that kind of life forever. Yet they don’t seem to have anything else.
Monte Hellman, another one of Roger Corman’s protégés, created a symbolic and entrancing road movie with Two-Lane Blacktop. His mastery as a director shows in the way he cultivates his images and relies on them more than the dialogue to convey his story and expose his characters. I’ve already mentioned comparisons to Easy Rider and my opinion that this movie represents the imprisonment of that lifestyle rather than the freedom of it. This comes across through Hellman’s filming. Hopper moved his camera in and out and around his bikes effortlessly. There was a sense of unlimited space and complete lack of rules. Hellman’s characters take a similar journey across America, but we always see the world from the point of view of inside the car. When we’re outside the car, we’re looking in at them. It doesn’t even matter what the outside world is. Their world is encased in glass and steel, and anything outside of it barely exists.
Hellman claims he cast James Taylor for the role of the driver after seeing his picture on a billboard. Taylor’s music career was just beginning to take off, but he agreed to test for and appear in this picture. I admit, I chuckled when I saw his name on the box, but I have to admit, he was right for the role. He plays the driver with a quiet kind of intensity, and maintains a believable sense of being lost when it comes to communicating outside the world of the automobile. Equally good is the late Dennis Wilson, who was most famous for being the Beach Boys’ drummer, but strikes a good casual note as the man who’s so in tune with the car that he makes statements like, “It’s not breathing right.”
Warren Oates, however, is a true standout as the GTO. He brings all the right notes to this character, from the loneliness to the silly smugness. This could have easily been just another caricature in a road movie, but he manages to bring out the humor and the sadness, and find just the right amount of truth in a character that, as he puts it, is so ungrounded.
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