- James Taylor is The Driver. Dennis Wilson is The Mechanic. Warren Oates is G.T.O. Laurie Bird is The Girl.
- I get the impression that this is even more information than Monte Hellman's bizarrely minimalist Two-Lane Blacktop would have wanted to divulge, but thankfully even offbeat cult movies have end credits. What happens in between the opening shots of drag racing and those end credits is, in all honesty, just a whole lot of driving and sitting around. It's a film that feels like it was trying to capture an early 70's road trip/muscle car enthusiast zeitgeist that may or may not have merited capturing, if it ever even really existed. Hellman makes the movie with such confidence, however, that he obviously disagreed.
- Almost all of the rather spartan dialogue that crosses the lips of The Driver and the Mechanic involves obscure details of automotive maintenance that no casual driver would ever understand. The carefree Girl is considerably more chatty, even if her life is correspondingly less well-defined. By far, the most interesting character is G.T.O. who just can't stop himself from telling tall tales. My favorite fib is probably that he got into cross-country racing when he was "scouting locations for a downhole movie on fast cars," which, if told in reverse, almost sounds like a believable origin story for Two-Lane Blacktop itself.
- So how to evaluate this strange film that regularly gets mentioned as one of the world's greatest road movies? From a purely technical perspective, Two-Lane Blacktop features some really excellent location scenery that is well-captured by the film's cinematography. The surprisingly low-key soundtrack is impressive, too, especially considering that it must have been tempting to have either Taylor or Wilson contribute a tune. In terms of influence, it's likely that this film created that weird category of existentialist movies featuring anonymous automobilers, including Walter Hill's The Driver and Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. As for whether or not I liked it, I guess it reminded me of actually going on a road trip. Some great moments, plenty of slow ones, and I wouldn't go out of my way to experience it again for a while.
