Two-Lane Blacktop # 88 of 101 Great Films

#88

1971

Two-Lane Black Top

Directed by Monte Hellman

Two- Lane blacktop

“The whole idea of the road, of going from one place to another, is essentially American.”

*–Two-Lane Blacktop Screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer

Either I’m an idiot – no comments!

GTO, The Mechanic, the Driver, The Girl

Or Two-lane Black Top is a masterpiece, a 100% American masterpiece,
a western epic with 400 horses and minimum dialog.

Monte Hellman a east coast kid and a west coast college graduate got his real world degree from
The Roger Corman College of Exploitation,
with a minor in fast & cheap.

Two of his best Corman projects were in partnership with Jack Nicholson;
Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting,
both westerns, both shot in 18 days and with pennies for a budgets.









Then in 1971 with Hollywood backing Hellman made Two Lane Black Top.
His cast 2 musicians, who had never acted before or since, an 18 year old newcomer, and a 20 year veteran of the small and big screen Warren Oates,
Oates, like the 18 year old newbie, Laurie Bird, left us way to early.


Both were shining stars. 

 
      Monte got help with the script from Rudy Wurlitzer and a first rate camera crew, Jack Deerson, Gregory Sandor & Ken Swor.  

The 30 member crew and actors traveled across the southeast and southwest, finishing principal filming in just 6 weeks, and for under a million.






         Some folks have mistaken the lack of conversation among the driver (James Taylor) and the mechanic (Dennis Wilson) as an obsession about a race that never ends, Critics have commented that the film transcends a road movie, its about 60’s America, a America in bad shape, maybe even dying, but I think the film is much simpler, Two Lane is an existential truth; it’s what men do. Not all men, GTO talks enough for both as does the girl.


But the Driver and the Mechanic don’t need monologues,

- Which by the way is the genius of the casting- 2 guys who make a decent living with their words, having them barely speaking- freakin genius! –




They are happy with the road, they will race, but it ain’t the race that fuels them it’s the road, it’s the music of the engine, it’s the open space,
the American landscape that fuels it all.


       Filmed in 1971, it gets lumped with Easy Rider as another “Counter Culture” movie a “Hippie” diatribe about the problems of American

but I think this movie doesn’t give a shit about hippies or counter culture.
If Easy Rider was a statement about the 60s, it was thru the eyes of Hollywood,
I don’t care, people can call Rider counter culture all they want, but it was made by veterans of the Hollywood system, and produced and starred the son of a Hollywood legend,

It was more about spoiled kids rebelling then America and its problems. 

Two Lane, is a working class statement, it’s about making things work, not grand ideas,
just machines, with tools they know how to use.
There are no mean as hell rednecks waiting to kill them on the road.
Around the turn in Two- Lane Black Top are people some like the Driver and the Mechanic, and some that aren’t, just regular working folks, and if they ask real nice, they just might get a hardboiled egg from the Mechanic.


Btw: the hardboiled egg, has a long tradition of being  traveling food, a treat that can be picked out of a jar, on the counter, all across the country in gas stations and small neighborhood grocery/butcher stores, at least when we had two lane black tops.

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101 Great Films video exhibit of Two-lane Blacktop

101 Great Films:

101 One False Move

100 Friends of Eddie Coyle

99 Tampopo

98 The Thing

97 Nanook of the North

96 The Battle of Algiers

95  The Third Man

94 Au Revoir Les Enfants

93 Meshes of the Afternoon

92 Alien

91 Young Frankenstein

90  Bull Durham

89 Los Olvidados