Pared right back, Two-Lane Blacktop is the petrolhead movie for those who like a lean burn. The actors are in the main non-actors, the dialogue is functional to the point of clinical austerity, there are no character names, just categorical slots for The Driver (James Taylor), The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), The Girl (Laurie Bird) and GTO (Warren Oates), so named because he drives a yellow 1970 Pontiac GTO.
Our guys, Driver and Mechanic, drive a 1955 Chevrolet 150, stripped back to the essentials to make it go faster, supercharged and painted in matt primer grey. As they drive across America, they challenge hotrodders in every small town they come across to race them, and then move on with their winnings. That’s all that’s going on – on the surface anyway.
Driver and Mechanic don’t really talk about much except carburettor problems and whether the engine is “breathing right”. And when The Girl climbs into the car hoping for a ride in whichever direction they’re going – she doesn’t seem too concerned – there’s no social niceties. Names are not exchanged. She just plonks herself in the back seat and is soon massaging the shoulders of Mechanic, though the look on Driver’s face suggests he’d rather she were massaging his.
That’s one of two plot trails this film follows – how everyone deals with the Girl. A second one is GTO, who talks where the other guys are silent, and spins one bullshit story after another as to why he’s on the road – he won the car, he’s a racing driver, a test pilot, owns a dealership, and so on, filling in the silences with endless nonsense and eventually challenging the guys in the Chevie to a race to Washington DC.
It’s not much of a race, in the same way that the relationship that The Girl has with The Mechanic isn’t much of a relationship. Not much happens.
The film was greenlit in the wake of the success of Easy Rider and the intention seems to be to do the same thing all over again – a couple of guys taking in a sweep of America, with GTO doing for this film what Jack Nicholson did for peace-loving hippies Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, filling in the gaps with chatter, to an extent being the straight edge and goad.
James Taylor and Dennis Wilson were both from the rock scene. Taylor’s album Sweet Baby James, released earlier that year, had suddenly made him a star. Wilson was the drummer in The Beach Boys – handsome and the only one who actually surfed. Neither had acted before, and nor had Laurie Bird, who was hired because she was a chick with a plausible stoner flow. Counterculture is the idea with these three. Against them Warren Oates, representing older, straighter, corrupt, white-sliced America, but also the only character who has any depth. That’s partly because GTO has more lines, partly also because Oates is a proper actor who knew how to be layered.
A slice of America, or more precisely Americana, is what director Monte Hellman serves up – the diners, the cheap motels, the Woolworth’s stores and gas stations – and he films in real locations, with plenty of real people for authenticity, chronologically. He took his cast and crew on the road, shooting in Techniscope, a cheese-parer’s format that used only half as much film as run-of-the-mill 35mm. Hence the grain – the image has been blown up to fill the screen.
It suits the hangdog nature of the whole thing, the slightly dishevelled format matching the ad-hoc journey of these latterday knights errant, the fair lady and the dark chevalier who would joust for her hand. A modern western with hits routes much further back in time.
The romance of the road is the film’s big sell. Americana goes minimal. Route 66 before the interstate had arrived. There’s an unusual mix of the mainstream and arthouse in this poignant meditation on a fast-disappearing America.
Two-Lane Blacktop – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
