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Film Description
With the melancholy open-road epic Two-Lane Blacktop, American auteur Monte Hellman poeticised the beautiful, terrible rootlessness of his nation in the era of Vietnam. Funded by Universal in a bid to recreate the success of Easy Rider – by giving a number of filmmakers $1m and final cut – Hellman's effort is now regarded as one of the key films of the New Hollywood renaissance of the early 1970s.
While driving eastward on Route 66, two rival car owners – The Driver (singer-songwriter James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys) in a souped-up, drag-racing '55 Chevy, and a middle-aged braggart (Warren Oates) in a gleaming GTO – begin to race for each other's 'pink slips' and the affections of the listless female hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) who joins them on the road.
Scripted by esteemed novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, and featuring the only screen performances of Taylor and Wilson, Two-Lane Blacktop remains a timeless, existential portrait of lives in transit and of a country questioning its identity.
New restored high-definition master, supervised and approved by Monte Hellman
Original mono soundtrack and optional newly remastered 5.1 mix
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
Audio commentary by Monte Hellman and associate producer Gary Kurtz
On The Road Again: Two-Lane Blacktop Revisited, a 43-minute video piece in which Monte Hellman revisits the film’s locations
Somewhere Near Salinas, a 28-minute interview by Monte Hellman with singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson
Sure Did Talk to You, a 24-minute video piece featuring interviews with producer Michael Laughlin, production manager Walter Coblenz, and the director’s son Jared Hellman
Rare archival screen-test footage of James Taylor and Laurie Bird
Original theatrical trailer
Optional music and effects track
A lavish 36-page booklet featuring rare production imagery, the words of Monte Hellman, and more.
"Two-Lane Blacktop" -
Howard Schumann on 4th January 2012
Two-Lane Blacktop is one of the most original and compelling American movies of the twentieth century. It is a road movie, a film about cars, and a search for meaning ... more >
Two-Lane Blacktop is one of the most original and compelling American movies of the twentieth century. It is a road movie, a film about cars, and a search for meaning in American life that could easily be called Zen and the Art of Drag Racing. Shot from the inside of a car, it is an authentic vision of what it is like to be driving across America at a specific historical moment.
The film was originally released to less than enthusiastic audiences but has since taken on the status of cult classic. Unlike Easy Rider, it is a film that simply observes and what it sees is pure Americana: its people, gas stations, diners, and drag strips. We feel the claustrophobia, the spaces, the speed, and the loneliness.
The film stars singers James Taylor and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys as drag racers who drive their souped-up 1955 Chevy across the country challenging locals to a drag race. The main characters are drifters. They come from nowhere and are headed east, toward a destination that is murky at best.
They are people whose reality begins and ends with their machines. Everyone talks about how good life can be -- somewhere else -- in New York, Chicago, the beaches of Florida, and the coast of Mexico, somewhere up the road apiece.
Though the Chevy looks old and ugly, it is as powerful as any car on the road and the driver and the mechanic treat it like their own flesh and blood. They go from town to town, just trying to survive by racing. Along the way they pick up a cherubic young roadie (Laurie Bird) who is willing to go wherever the ride takes her.
Two-Lane Blacktop is an exceptionally beautiful film, a poetic description of a world without possibilities. Everyone is biding their time waiting for life to turn out rather than creating the possibility. The film looks for the soul of America in the early 1970s and comes up empty.
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