Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Directed by Monte Hellman
A driver and mechanic drag racing for money cross paths with a female hitchhiker and a drifter who challenges them to a cross-country race.
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What critics compared Two-Lane Blacktop to
Ryan Gosling stars as the film’s never-named protagonist (shades of the similarly nameless heroes of “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “The Driver”), who works by day as a mechanic and occasional Hollywood stunt driver, and sometimes by night as a fast and furious getway-car driver for thieves.
Drive, which won Nicolas Winding Refn the Best Director prize at Cannes last spring, is a sharply etched, finely tuned homage to the existential road movies of the 1970s like Vanishing Point (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) in which the nature of human existence was fused with the open road.
Think “Two-Lane Blacktop” meets Kubrick’s “The Killing” meets Bresson’s “Pickpocket” and you’ll have some idea of what’s in store.
And it easily leaves other street-racing movies of its kind in the dust, even classics like "Vanishing Point" and "Two-Lane Blacktop."
A wearisome, affected amalgamation of Monte Hellman’s prototypical road movie Two-Lane Blacktop and Todd Louiso’s insufferable mope-fest Love Liza , Gallo’s misfire is a work of staggering dullness that, from its somber opening scene in which Bud loses a motorcycle race, repeatedly foreshadows the futility of the main character’s odyssey toward his desperately desired goal.
Like Monte Hellmanâs sublime Two-Lane Blacktop and Jack Cardiffâs 1968 Alain Delon/Marianne Faithful vehicle Girl on a Motorcycle, The Brown Bunny is, on the face of it, an existential exercise in cross-country motion, a travelogue in which the exteriors are never as important as the interior life of the main character, who in this case is Galloâs Bud Clay.
Bigelow will forever have my heart as the women responsible for one of my foundational films as a younger asshole, Near Dark , whose band of nomadic Midwestern vampires led me to her Two-Lane Blacktop homage The Loveless (the debut vehicle for Willem Dafoe); her fascinating phallus-play Blue Steel; and then forward into the years-ahead-of-its-time Strange Days .
Its roots lie in the cycle of quasi-mystical car movies that followed Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop , where fast driving was a way for a man (and it was always a man) to achieve a kind of existential purity, to break society’s shackles and simply be.
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“Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” “Badlands.”
I wanted Traffic , I got Two-Lane Blacktop .
Casual moviegoers would enjoy American Graffiti no matter what, I’m sure of it, but Two-Lane Blacktop is a trip that may be lost on those that aren’t hardened cinephiles.