The Empire Masterpiece

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

A road movie that goes the full Monte

- Adam Smith

DIRECTOR MONTE HELLMAN has always felt like a footnote in the grand story of Hollywood’s last Golden Age: an outsider amongst outsiders, rarely mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Coppola, Lucas and Scorsese. But his brief filmography, in Ride In The Whirlwind and The Shooting, a brace of ‘acid Westerns’ he shot for Roger Corman back-to-back and for under $80,000, contains two of the decade’s most distinctive films. And in Two-Lane Blacktop he created arguably the best, possibly the strangest, and certainly the purest, road movie ever made.

If Hellman’s minor-key masterpiece never really got the kudos of the other classics of the period, it was cut from the same cloth of its better-known stablemates. In late 1969, after the shocking success of Easy Rider, bewildered executives at Universal unpacked the ancient cultural ear-trumpet, detected something of a youthquake in progress, and promptly panicked. “It was frightening,” studio bigwig Ned Tanen later remembered. “These were ageing gentlemen who did not remotely understand where their audience had gone. Suddenly we were looking at these movies where everybody was dropping acid, and fucking in the park.”