DVD Pick of the Month: December

Road Games

By D.K. Holm

It’s the cult film to end all cult films, and it’s also considered a filmmakers film the way Nabokov, say, is viewed as a writer’s writer. Yet Two Lane Blacktop has been rather hard to see since its initial release in 1971. It didn’t make it onto videotape until the mid 1990s, and was released on DVD only in 1999. Now the Criterion Collection has issued a definitive two-disc set that should announce to general viewers that Monte Hellman’s road movie is one of the most interesting and oblique of American films.
 
Bad luck dogged the film from the beginning. The film’s script was published in its entirety in the April 1971 issue of Esquire, where it was heralded as the magazine’s nomination for “movie of the year,” and afterwards daily paper critics (who were perhaps bored with the so-called youthquake of films coming out of Hollywood) went gunning for it. They reviled it for the somnambulistic acting of leads James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (which clashed with Warren Oates’s hopped up performance), with its lack of dialogue, its episodic narrative, its inconclusive or arty ending, and what they viewed as the film’s general pretentiousness. Consequently, the film fared poorly at the box office, and dropped quickly into obscurity, the flame of its reputation fanned only by a budding generation of filmmakers that included Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, and Alison Anders.
 
Today, Two Lane Blacktop can be viewed as a rare American art film, an existential epic on par with the work of Antonioni at the time in Italy. On the surface, it’s a simple story of a cross-country race between two rootless, monosyllabic car jockeys (Taylor and Wilson) in a souped up ‘55 Chevy and a hustling loner (Oates) in a Pontiac. Observed closely, it’s a film that takes the temperature of America at the time—its love affair with cars, its restlessness, its class divisions and generosity, all graced with now-precious images of the country’s now deteriorating or bypassed back roads. The wordless alliance of Taylor and Wilson will remind modern viewers of the pair in the underrated Way of the Gun (which must have been influenced by Hellman’s movie), and the near-documentary realism of illegal street races and obscure diners and gas stations create a backdrop before which the drama between two ways of American life—the repressed yet driven (as represented by Taylor and Wilson), and the lonely and restless (Oates)—vie for ascendancy.
 
In addition to the film (which enjoys a beautiful transfer) on disc one, Criterion’s box set also includes two audio commentary tracks: one by Hellman, the other by writer Rudy Wurlitzer. Disc two features the film’s trailer, a survey of the film’s locations today, a featurette about the film’s 1955 Chevy, a collection of audition tapes and outtakes, and video interviews with Hellman, James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, and the film’s producer and production manager. In addition, the disc comes packaged with a 38-page insert that contains chapter titles, credits, transfer information, an essay by Kent Jones, a “making of” article that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1970, and a list by Richard Linklater of what he loves about the film. In addition, there’s a 112-page perfectly bound paperback book of the script, with a new introduction by Hellman. Criterion’s 2-disc Two Lane Blacktop retails for $39.95 and hits the street Tuesday, December 31st.