1971. Starring James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, Warren Oates. Directed by Monte Hellman.
A race across country between aimless youth in a 1955 Chevrolet and pointless adulthood in a 1970 GTO, with the affection and attention of a faithless teenager as the prize, Monte Hellman’s fantastic Two-Lane Blacktop is one of my favorite movies, right down to the then-controversial ending.
The Driver (Taylor) and The Mechanic (Wilson), fresh from hustling locals with home-built hot rods, aren’t far along in “heading east” when The Girl (Bird) hops in their backseat. She watches them as they drive in silence, listening for flaws in the engine, and decides to try to come between them. On the road, they encounter GTO (Warren Oates, in an amazing performance, sporting a rainbow of V-necked sweaters), who — once you’ve heard all his variations in his story — is probably a fired television producer who has lost his family. The boys challenge him to a race to Washington D.C. for pink slips, and their routes and lives merge.
The race is no Cannonball Run — the Driver and the Mechanic stop to fix GTO’s carburetor, the Girl hops from one car to the other, the drivers even switch cars at one point. There are more dragstrip hustles to pay for gas, but the competition surrounds something more . . . existential. As GTO explains to one of the many hitchhikers he picks up, after adopting for himself his competitors’ story of building and racing a classic Chevy, “Those satisfactions are permanent.”
Warren Oates is something else here. Face to face with the occupants of the car he’s passed repeatedly, anonymously, on the New Mexican highway, he nervously drinks his Coke and gets in and out of his car. He lies to the people he picks up, trying out new identities, full of confidence. And when the Girl chooses to ride with him, he promises her new destinations and a house in the desert, because as he confides to the sleeping girl, “If I don’t get grounded pretty soon, I’m going to go into orbit.”
One of the best characters in Two-Lane Blacktop (considering that the 1955 Chevrolet and the 1970 GTO get screen credits at the end) is what I’d call “undeveloped America.” Seeing the shoulder-less roads, gravel parking lots, and roadside cafes and gas stations unearth a lot of memories for me. Given that you can’t drive 50 miles today without passing a McDonald’s or Subway, and every BP and Mobil station emit the same blandness as you pay at the pump, the unfranchised diners and attendant-filled gas stations here seem as foreign as they once were familiar.
Hellman picked Taylor for the role after seeing his face on a billboard, and made a good choice for the subtly intense Driver. Wilson, Beach Boy drummer at the top of their popularity, is surprisingly natural in his first and only acting role before his drowning in 1983. Laurie Bird was petulant and cute, and perfect for her role, and it is sad to learn after looking at her screen credits that she killed herself in 1979. I think I’ll just imagine her climbing into the backseat of another muscle car and disappearing down the road.