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Four lost souls in two archetypal automobiles take to the back roads and endless highways of redneck country. James Taylor (The Driver) and Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic) play a pair of speed motorheads cruising around in a '55 Chevy. Their rootless paths cross that of drifter Laurie Bird and the garrulous GTO (Warren Oates). Co-writer Rudy Wurlitzer appears as a hot rod driver and Harry Dean Stanton plays a cowboy hitch-hiker with wandering hands. The entire screenplay by Rudy Wurlifzer was published in Esquire and audaciously proclaimed 'the film of the year'.
Easy Rider (1969) established the road movie as a box-office genre, but this minimalist film confirmed it as a transcendental artform. The laid-back, existential narrative is a laconic, multi-iayered musing on the dreaming of America. Utterly modern in its sensibility, classical in form, rich in sub-text and topical reference, Two-Lane Blacktop spoke for its generation with a rare eloquence, unlike Easy Rider, its more famous contemporary.
The saddest footnote is that in the quarter ot a century since the film, director Monte Hellman has been mostly unemployable (although he did give a critical kickstart to the career of a young wannabe and longtime admirer named Quentin Tarantino—Hellman is credited as an executive producer on Reservoir Dogs), and three of its four stars—Warren Oates, Laurie Bird and Dennis Wilson—have since met untimely deaths.