Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) – a trip along Highway 66

The Two-Lane Blacktop (Two-Lane Blacktop, 1971) directed by Monte Hellman is one of the backbone of the road movie that blossomed with the lush color of American vineyards in the first half of the 70s. Intoxicating in their own way, they, in fact, tell about nothing. It’s like action movies, but with a minus sign in terms of what’s happening on the screen. After watching one of these films, there are a minimum of scenes in my head, a maximum of ten minutes of screen time, and, almost certainly, the ending.

Perhaps the reason for this is that the rest of the time the characters just drive in their cars along the road and have the most ordinary conversations, exactly the same as we are sitting in the kitchen. The Two-Lane Blacktop has it all. But there are several reasons why some consider this movie to be the best road movie of all time. The first of them is that the film was almost completely shot on Highway 66. The legendary route at that time had already gone into the sunset and was mostly abandoned, and few people at that time shot anything in those places. The second reason is cars.

An aging Chevy One-Fifty versus a fresh GTO. A real confrontation of generations. By the way, two of the three One-Fifties from this film will later turn out to be in another very cult film: American Graffiti. Well, the GTO is just an extremely cute GTO. And that’s enough. Seriously. So much so that the characters in this picture don’t even have names. Their names are: The Driver, the Mechanic, the Judge and the Girl. Well, okay, actually not even a Judge, but just a GTO. The car looked and had all the signs of The Judge model, but was never named a Judge.

The driver and Mechanic, by the way, are played by folk musician James Taylor and drummer of The Beach Boys Dennis Wilson. But back to the cars. GTO were absolutely factory models (and even according to the documents for some reason they were not listed as a modification of The Judge), they were rented for filming and there were two of them. The director of the film drove one of the cars for three whole months until the lease expired and the Pontiac went back to the studio. In his own words, in those three months he had more speeding tickets than in his entire life, and one of the cops told him, “Well, it’s just because you have an orange car. It stands out in the stream.”

Chevy, as already noted, were on the set in the amount of three pieces. It must be assumed that each of them was equipped in its own way, but one of them, used for filming scenes in the salon and definitely not one of those that later went to American Graffiti, was auctioned off in 2015. Details such as a straight axle with coilovers by Richard Root, a 4-speed M-22 Muncie Rock Crusher transmission (with a very specific sound that can be heard in the movie), a tunnel-ram-style intake manifold, a rear axle differential from Oldsmobile, and all this on a large Chevy 454 block are mentioned at the auction..

These are the heroes in our cinema today. The film became a cult classic, tribute albums were released in his honor, he was named as one of the inspirations for the creation of the Cannonball race (and this race gave us a couple more films, which I will definitely tell you about) and so on and so forth. And if we discard the big words and high marks, then in fact there is only a minimalistic dialogue and the same minimalistic, at best existential message to the viewer, with absolute minimalism in actions, and all this looks extremely easy and pleasant, plus for the most part it is quickly forgotten. I think it’s not even worth saying who should watch this movie and who shouldn’t… Ahem, I’ll say this: if you’ve read up to this point, then you, comrade, definitely should. Enjoy watching.