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Go East, Young Man Two-Lane Blacktop was supposed to be the next Easy Rider. But it went in a different direction.

By Elbert Ventura
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007, at 12:02 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Two-Lane Blacktop held up a mirror, and the audience didn't like what it saw: a counterculture whose rejection of society had curdled into soul-killing solipsism. But if the movie's content gave its demographic pause, its form all but sealed its fate. With its rock stars and fast cars, Two-Lane Blacktop seemed to promise a pop buzz. But instead of piling on the au courant gimmicks—grandstanding zooms, shock cuts, and other look-ma-no-hands pyrotechnics—Hellman streamlined his movie. Using nonprofessional actors (Taylor, Wilson, and Bird were all first-timers) and natural light, Hellman imbued his movie with unadorned naturalism. The desultory mood of an endless road trip is evoked with lengthy, languorous takes and static shots looking out the windshield. This approach no doubt disappointed an audience recently stimulated by the New Wave fillips of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. Two-Lane Blacktop was a meditative and elliptical mood piece in a crowd of rowdy and flashy peers—a sui generis convergence of Antonioni and Americana. Its long silences and depopulated spaces—new and bracing in an American context—nonetheless tested the patience of viewers fed on a cinematic diet of blood, bullets, and bravura technique.

Watching Two-Lane Blacktop today, what leaps out is how unpretentious it is. Hellman's self-effacing style is at the service of his material (compare that with Mike Nichols' work in The Graduate, which has come to seem faddish and affected). A movie that looks off into the distance and keeps its gaze there, Two-Lane Blacktop is a lean and melancholy beauty—a moving-picture Giacometti.

Of course, Two-Lane Blacktop was hardly the only failed youth picture of the period. Hopper's follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Fonda's The Hired Hand, both from the same Universal production unit, also tanked. Paul Lewis, line producer for Hopper, saw those failures as a harbinger of things to come, telling Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, "The end of the '70s began at the beginning of the '70s." The reasons for the end of the youth-picture movement were various—clueless studio marketing, fickle audiences, crummy movies. But Hellman's sin was to be too radical—thematically and formally—for his audience.

Filmed on the original Route 66, the movie inverts the American trope of the road always leading west. Indeed, the destination is as unromantic as it gets: Washington, D.C. It spoils nothing to say that the movie never makes it to the nation's capital. Instead the Chevy finds itself in another drag race in the final scene. As the cars screech forward, we watch the view over The Driver's shoulder, the road receding underneath but stretching ahead as far as the eye can see. Hellman then makes a stylistic pirouette. The scene slows down, imperceptibly at first, then more noticeably, until it seems as if we're watching the final moments frame by frame. The film catches in the projector, the image freezes for a second, until finally the celluloid catches fire. Richard Linklater rightly called it "the most purely cinematic ending in film history." It also serves as a fitting metaphor for the flameout of the youth movement in Hollywood.

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Elbert Ventura is a writer in Washington, D.C.
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Remarks from the Fray:

The comments about how Two Lane Blacktop was directed and acted, and therefore how it stood out from its peers, is spot on.

But really, it wasn't a counter culture story per se. I'm not even sure if it was much of a story. What looks like a story about two guys racing another guy cross country, is actually an excuse to spend time with two cars, the '55 Bel Air mostly, and the GTO.

This move is a gearhead's movie. The way the Bel Air was set up for the street was, at the time, pretty ground breaking. It has radiused rear wheel wells and a roll cage, and a mailbox for an air scoop. It is basically a drag car set up to be street legal. It made a huge impression on car guys back then for blending drag strip with streetability.

The GTO was "The Judge," the hottest big block GTO which Pontiac ever built. In the movie it was brand new and had only begun sales to the public within months of the movie release. Another reason to get gearheads in the seats.

My favorite part is when James Taylor asks the gas station attendant - another young guy - to fill up the tank. The guy's pumping. There's a long silence:

Gas station attendant: 350?

Taylor: 454.

Gas station attendant: No shit?

THAT is true gearhead dialogue.

--EarlyBird

(To reply, click here.)

(12/26)

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