In Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Kirk Douglas plays a modern day cowboy at odds with a prairie scarred by telephone wires, property fences, railroad tracks and Dwight D. Eisenhower's serpentine interstate highway project. Coming as it did early in the "space race" days of rapid modernization, the film was an elegy for the American west, a paean to a frontier vanishing as cars and drivers outpaced horses and riders. Yet less than ten years later, American films were suggesting that the highway itself was the final frontier and those who traveled it heirs to the cowboy mythos. Easy Rider (1969), Vanishing Point (1971) and even Steven Spielberg's made-for-TV Duel (1971) all sent their protagonists out onto the open road for punishing journeys-to-self. The so-called "road movies" that followed were particularized by edgy popular hits (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry [1974]) and seldom-seen misfires (Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins [1975]), along with dozens of titles (The Pursuit of Happiness [1971], Aloha Bobby and Rose [1975], Macon County Line [1974], Heroes [1977]) that did fair-to-good business for all involved before vanishing into thin air like so much blue exhaust. Widely considered to be the king of this perambulatory subgenre is Monte Hellman's "existential road movie" Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). More inward-looking than picturesque, the film concerns a coast-to-coast road race between two young gearheads (musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in their first and only narrative film appearances) in a suped up '55 Chevy, an aging leadfoot (Warren Oates) in a canary yellow Pontiac GTO and the young hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) who goes from car to car like Goldilocks searching for the most comfy chair.

Two-Lane Blacktop was made possible by the surprise success of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider a year earlier. As a result, Universal Pictures studio head Lew Wasserman reluctantly assembled a "youth unit" of young directors (or, at least "youngish," as in the case of then 40 year-old Monte Hellman) thought to be in closer touch with the counterculture aesthetic than the aging jobbers who had risen through the ranks of the by then faltering Hollywood studio system. Placed in charge of this experimental unit was producer Ned Tanen, who was given the task of ferreting out marketable material and realizing the productions for under a million dollars apiece. Tanen's custodianship was remarkably hands-off, giving his start-up directors near complete artistic freedom as long as their productions hewed to their assigned budgets. Among the first features out of the gate were Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (1971) and Two-Lane Blacktop. Although the Perry and Forman films were at least critical successes, the others were undisputed box office bombs. Expectations for Two-Lane Blacktop had been high, with Esquire going so far as to publish Rudy Wurlitzer's script in its entirety and brand the unmade feature "movie of the year." The domino effect of these back-to-back failures nearly toppled Universal, which was saved from receivership by the hefty receipts earned by George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973).

If Two-Lane Blacktop pissed off paying audiences back in 1971 (Esquire printed a contrite apologia vis à-vis a self-administered "Dubious Achievement Award"), that seems to have been Monte Hellman's intention. In the tradition of the best social commentary, the film is critical of no one so much as those it seems to flatter. With their long hair, slovenly attire and beat insouciance, James Taylor's Driver and Dennis Wilson's Mechanic seem at first like textbook rebels, heirs to the rootless legacy of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy; in truth they are as dead-eyed conservative and coldly uncommunicative as an old married couple. The addition of Laurie Bird as "The Girl" brings with it the promise of a softcore ménage a trois that goes unfulfilled – in fact, more heat is generated in the enmity between Taylor and Warren Oates, as the forty-something ho-dad whose backstory changes every time he invites a new rider into his shotgun seat.

While the characters (at first combative and later as circumstantial confederates) make a pantomime of familial bonds (The Driver claims The Girl as his wife to throw off the highway patrol while GTO deflects southern inhospitality by feigning kinship with his road rivals), there is something essentially infertile about this group. For all their talk of bodily functions (eating, sleeping, sex, death), the concept of birth is never broached; putting their competition on pause, the racers share a snack of hard-boiled eggs, a potent symbol of canceled fecundity. Well before the film's final image literally melts in the gate, Two-Lane Blacktop has revealed itself as an unflattering self portrait of mid-century America, burned out and barren, stamping the pedal to the metal on the fast track to nowhere.

Producer: Michael S. Laughlin
Associate Producer: Gary Kurtz
Director: Monte Hellman
Story: Will Corry
Screenplay: Rudy Wurlitzer, Floyd Mutrux (uncredited)
Cinematography: Gregory Sandor (uncredited)
Film Editing: Monte Hellman
Music: Billy James (uncredited)
Cast: Warren Oates (GTO), James Taylor (The Driver), Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic), Laurie Bird (The Girl), Rudy Wurlitzer (Hot Rod Driver), Jaclyn Hellman (Hot Rod Driver's Girl), Bill Keller (Texas hitchhiker), Harry Dean Stanton (Oklahoma hitchhiker), George Mitchell (Man at Accident), Katherine Squire (Old Woman), Melissa Hellman (Little Girl), Alan Vint (Roadhouse tough).
C-103m.

by Richard Harland Smith