Blu-ray: 'Two-Lane Blacktop' – The great American existential road movie

"Two-Lane Blacktop" (Criterion) is one of the most alienated evocations of contemporary America ever made, an almost abstract study in dislocation and obsession set against an anonymous landscape of roadside diners and rest stops.

James Taylor is The Driver and Dennis Wilson is the Mechanic, a street-racing team in a '55 Chevy prowling the back roads looking for private races and side bets. To call them gypsies is to romanticize an empty existence: these guys are disconnected to everything except their ride, just drifting through the country and living from bet to bet. Warren Oates is brilliant as GTO, a middle-aged drifter who slips into a new persona with every stranger he meets, lighting up anew with every fabricated life story he spins. Laurie Bird co-stars as the girl, a hitchhiker who leaps out of a psychedelic van and into the Chevy like it was a second home.

Directed by Monte Hellman from a script reworked by author Rudolph Wurlitzer, it's the great existential road movie ever made, a modern western without frontiers, only paved trails that go everywhere and lead nowhere. The story is ostensibly their race across the country "for pinks" (pink slips), but it evaporates like everything else in their lives, colored gone around the next corner. Taylor and Wilson deliver appropriately blank performances, only expressing emotion when the Girl sparks jealousy between them, while Oates is a glib dynamo constantly trying on new characters as he ping-pongs between the coasts.

“How fast does it go?” asks the Driver, admiring GTO’s car. “Fast enough,” he answers. The Driver snaps: “You can never go fast enough.” These are characters on the road to nowhere who can’t work up enough speed to escape themselves.

Features all of the supplements of Criterion's 2007 DVD release. Filmmaker and fan Allison Anders ("Grace of My Heart") joins director Monte Hellman on one of the disc's two commentary tracks, playing moderator and host with observations and questions. He's happy to talk about his career and answer production questions, but when asked about GTO's psychology, he laughingly answers "Don't ask me those questions. I'm not going to analyze my movie." Writer Rudolph Wurlitzer is joined by writer David Meyer on a very low key second track which plays more like an interview and commentary on the film.

All the video supplements have been upgraded to HD. "On the Road Again: Two-Lane Blacktop Revisited" is a 42-minute interview with Hellman shot as a road movie documentary with a film crew (made up of his students from Cal-Arts) crammed in the car as he drives around to select shooting locations. Hellman himself interviews James Taylor (who has still never seen the film) and Kris Kristofferson (whose song "Me and Bobby McGee" is part of the soundtrack) for short video featurettes (respectively titled "Make It Three Yards" and "Somewhere Near Salina." There are also interviews with producer Michael Laughlin, production manager Walter Coblenz, Jared Hellman, Stephen Gaydos of Variety, and filmmaker Dennis Bartok (in the fittingly-titled "Sure Did Talk To You"), screen test outtakes with Laurie Bird and James Taylor, and galleries of stills, plus a booklet with an essay by critic Kent Jones, appreciations by director Richard Linklater and musician Tom Waits, and a reprint of Michael Goodwin's 1970 Rolling Stone article "On Route 66, Filming Two-Lane Blacktop."

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