Cheap Two-Lane Blacktop (DVD) (James Taylor, Warren Oates) (Monte Hellman) Price

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Customer Reviews of Two-Lane Blacktop

For a true gearhead, Two Lane Blacktop is a joy. To see all of the legendary sixties muscle cars in their natural environment.....it calls to mind a tradition of (illegal) street racing that still exists today, for better or worse. Anyone who has seen it or done it will instantly be pulled into the movie. Of course, the quintessential gray primer 55 Chevy, an unbeatable home-built street warrior, is the true hero of the film.

You don't see this movie for the dialogue and there isn't a lot of it. Some of the gearhead lingo is kind of lame, like where the gas station attendant asks the Driver (James Taylor) if the 55 Chevy has a "Chevy block." No duh. Don't worry about it. That isn't why you are watching it.

This movie is a time machine. As a 38 year old, I vividly remember those days and those cars, but through the eyes of an eight year old with Hot Wheels cars and a Dad that drove four door sedans (still does). I always wanted (and now have) fast cars. Seeing this movie for the first time 20 years ago poured even more fuel on the flame. Getting the opportunity to see it has always been an elusive pleasure, because it has been broadcast so rarely, and then often edited. This past Christmas, my girlfriend got me a copy in the collector's tin. I have watched it several times since, sometimes very loud. The movie has a deep texture, maybe even more so than Easy Rider, from which comparisons can be drawn. You aren't watching the people alone in this movie, however. Rather, you are taking in everything that is in it. The wide screen format is only way to go. If only you could smell the fuel, the oil and the burning rubber while you watch it. Every car guy has to have this video, along with Vanishing Point and Bullitt.

Waiting for Godot....with Burning Rubber
Great exploration of American angst....and American existentialist non-answers. Rudy Wurlitzer's script is a gem. Here's a clue for you Beach Boys fans out there. It ain't supposed to be fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the T-Bird away. The acting is supposed to be "flat," emotionless (with the exception of Warren Oates' role as "GTO" and Laurie Bird's role as "The Girl"). The characters are supposed to be from nowhere and going nowhere. They are characters who have stripped away all "extraneous" elements from their lives. Hellman, given big-studio backing for the first and ultimately only time in his career thus far, was an exceeding brave man to make this film. Read some Camus and some Sartre and some Beckett, then talk to some serious gearheads for a while, then take a long road trip on some two-lane highways in my home turf, the American Southwest. Then watch this movie. You'll appreciate just what Hellman and company accomplished. By the way, James Taylor is the only leading actor in the film still living, and he made it while he was in the throes of a serious battle with heroin. Who would have thought he would have been the last left standing?

A RESPONSE TO REVIEWER "CORREIA"
Hey Correia,
Everyone's entitled to their opinions, but you're in the minority here. Two-Lane Blacktop is worshipped by film-lovers around the world and is regularly cited as one of the best pop-art flicks of the 70's, one of the most exciting periods in American cinema.

The reviewer's two complaints (little dialogue, couldn't understand what it was about) reveal the shortcomings of the reviewer, not the film. I mean really: "no dialogue?" Is he serious? Has he never seen a Western? A film noir? Charlie Chaplin? Keaton? Bresson? Wong Kar Wai?

In order to get Reservoir Dogs made, Quentin Tarantino got Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman to co-produce. I'm not a big Tarantino fan, but he DOES have great taste in other people's movies [his film company A Band Aparte is named after a Jean-Luc Godard film (paucity of dialogue, anyone?), he helped get Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express distributed, and idolizes Monte Hellman as one of the great American directors].

Based on the fact that Correia would critique a movie because it has little dialogue, it is no surprise that he "had absolutely no idea what the movie is about." Surely he can't mean the plot? Two muscle-car drivers race across country for their cars' pink slips? Most Schwarzenegger movies are less "high concept" (i.e. easy to sum up in a sentence).

Or is Correia admitting that he couldn't identify any Grand Themes or Social Issues? It's true, Hellman doesn't hit his viewers over the head with Deep Meanings. Like most of the greatest works of art, Hellman allows the meaning to be porous, letting each viewer read a certain amount of their own lives and themes into the characters.

TLB bears analysis, and is in fact deeply philosophical, but it is first a riveting aesthetic and emotional experience. Like a great landscape painting (or a David Lynch film?), it is primarily meditative, spiritual, and even deeply religious, rather than intellectual.

While watching it one re-experiences and understands many of the best things 'about' America-- the Road, movement, freedom-- and some of the worst-- rootlessness, restlessness, alienation. It can be read as a portrait of the modern, secularist, existential journey through life; in the lack of dialogue one could feel alienation and aloneness, or a comfortable silence expressing the deep bond between the driver and mechanic (we never hear the character's names, nor do the credits give them any).

TLB traffics in pop iconography, in quintessentially American images. We travel with the perfect embodiment of the Self-Reliant American Male, through rugged, iconic American landscapes, until the landscape and the travellers (and the audience?) become one.

Have these two men achieved a level of self-reliance that has freed them from the constraints of civilization? Or has their laconic independence imprisoned them, dooming them to ride alone, ala John Wayne in The Searchers? Hurtling through a Godless universe with only the most ill-defined of goals to guide them, and so on? Undergrad term paper, anyone?

The value of any creative expression is in the effort you expend, the distance you travel, to explore its meaning. Movies and books should pull us out of what we know, force us to expand to incorporate new ways of seeing and thinking. It ain't always easy but it's almost always rewarding. I applaud Correia for trying, but just because TLB isn't immediately easy to 'get' doesn't mean it isn't a great work of art.