Two-lane blacktop (1971)

[oscar jubis]

I just re-watched Two-lane Blacktop on Criterion DVD. I am preparing a screening list for the film history courses I will be teaching in the Fall and Spring semesters. This collaboration between director Monte Hellman and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Walker) is one of the best films of the New American Cinema. It is a product of a period of 8 years or so (late 60s to mid-70s) when Hollywood financed production of daringly modernist films with the aim of attracting the "counter-cultural" younger demographic.

Two-lane Blacktop has four main characters known simply as the driver, the mechanic, the girl, and "GTO", the middle-aged guy played by the great Warren Oates who drives that Pontiac model. The scarcity of psychological dimension in these characters is a modernist trait found in films like Last Year at Marienbad by which the lack of individuation of the characters renders them representative and archetypal. They function as stand-ins for particular groups or reflect the human condition in general rather than a single subjectivity. Hellman uses James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson like Bresson used his "models". Near nothing passes between their lips unrelated to the souped-up ’55 Chevy they ride on the amateur racing circuit. GTO is in the habit of picking up and chatting up hitchhikers. We find out he lost his job and his wife but little else. He often fibs and misrepresents himself, effectively destabilizing his sense of identity. The viewer's curiosity about the characters remains unsatiated. The driver and the mechanic encounter GTO on the road. They decide to race to D.C. from the southwest for the “pink slips” (car ownership papers), creating certain viewer expectations associated with genre conventions . But nobody is in a rush to get to D.C., or anywhere it seems, and the film becomes a series of digressions and interruptions.

What emerges is an insightful picture of America at a specific historical juncture when the idealism of the 60s had yielded to exhaustion, aimlessness, and confusion. This is America on the verge of sending Nixon back to the White House and it is sad and a little creepy. Two-lane Blacktop denies the viewer a sense of closure and there is no catharsis. The film ends in media res, with a view of the driver from the back seat of the Chevy. The shot comes to a stop when the image freezes and the film burns out and self-destructs. Hellman explains "we stopped the film in the projector but we didn’t end the story". The last line of dialogue, spoken by GTO to two soldiers he picks up, refers to "emotions that stay with you" and "permanent satisfactions" in a context that underlines their scarcity and elusiveness in contemporaneous America.

[Chris Knipp]

Your comments about the period and influences or links are very helpful. I would like to write something of my own about how it feels and how it felt then to watch the movie. I want to see it again on a big screen. I have a copy of my own somewhere, but would like to see it somewhere like Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, which has shown it before I'm sure. I think maybe the former PFA director Tom Luddy (now director of the Telluride FF) has old ties with Wurlitzer and Hellman. I am thinking also my old classmate and frat brother and the Producer of Five Easy Pieces Richard Wechsler, also did have ties.

It's good that you emphasize the importance of Rudy Wurlitzer's involvement.

[oscar jubis]

Well, well. Five Easy Pieces (and The Conversation and Wanda) is another great movie I might show in school. Nicholson produced and starred in another Monte Hellman movie, The Shootist, which Rosenbaum considers a "key forerunner of Jarmusch's Dead Man". I am excited about the prospect of watching these films with my students. I hope that specialized theaters continue to show them rather than more obvious programming like the Godfather movies (which I recently rewatched) and MASH and other good, popular stuff.

[Chris Knipp]

Of course PFA would be unlikely to show the Godfather series, as a priority. The Coversation is a good source for you especially given your interest in European art films. I don't see the point of Wanda and even found its humor mean. I saw The Shootist but don't remember it at present.

[oscar jubis]

We reacted to Wanda quite differently. Here's my capsule review, written in 2005:

Wanda (USA/1971)

Winner of the Critics Prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival, received great reviews during its commercial run at the Cinema II in Manhattan, and then erased from memory. At least in the USA. Europeans, particularly the French, wouldn't let it disappear. This independent feature, the only one directed by Barbara Loden before she died at age 48, was re-released in France in 2003, and then on dvd last year. What a revelation it is! An honest, cliche-free character study of a drifter lost in the coal towns of western Pennsylvania. A feminist film perhaps, yet free of dogma and didacticism. An improvisational film to a great extent yet not a moment seems superfluous. Shot in 16 mm, mostly with handheld cameras, yet never amateurish or crude. Wanda is a woman whose aimlessness and good figure make her particularly vulnerable, but she is not a "victim". Wanda can perhaps be described as a person who is not a good fit for the roles available within her milieu. She ellicits our sympathy even though she seems to have little interest in her two children, whom she admits are "better off" with her ex-husband. Tony-award winner Barbara Loden wrote, directed and played the main role in a film that deserves a place of honor amongst the great American Independent films. Wanda is every bit as good as Cassavetes' Shadows, Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers, and Biberman's Salt of the Earth. It's simply too good to remain in obscurity.

[Chris Knipp]

I was confused and thinking of something else. I have not seen this, and am getting it from Netflix.

I watched Guy and Madeleine and could see why you and others like it so much, though I didn't quite fall in love with it.

[oscar jubis]

Wanda is a sad movie, as I remember it. Tell me what you think, Chris. I think Blacktop is the one to show in school. I'm glad you watched Guy and Madeline .

[Chris Knipp]

I'll let you know.

[Johann]

The Last Detail is another one that you could show students- any Nicholson films from Five Easy Pieces to Reds would be great- that's when he was really on a streak: Milos Forman, Antonioni, Ken Russell, Kubrick...he directed...won another Oscar in '83 and on and on.
Jack's a steamroller.

Warren Oates is one of the greats too- I will check out Cockfighter someday. Didn't Hellman want to direct Pulp Fiction and Tarantino said "No. This is Mine".? I read that somewhere...
The 70's were something else man..I was BORN in the middle of it. Dig it. LOL

[oscar jubis]

Good choice. I will definitely be watching The Last Detail again soon.

Since 2-lane, I've re-watched four movies included in the Criterion Collection's "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story": The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, and The King of Marvin Gardens.

I also rewatched a movie that fits with this bunch but was not released until 1980, a few years after the period considered "New American Cinema". I am referring to Dennis Hopper's fierce and uncompromising Out of the Blue. Must-watch!

All these movies could be screened to correspond with my lecture(s) on "New American Cinema". I think this is a very important period. I will dedicate substantial screening time to it, which may mean slighting the Czech New Wave or New German Cinema. As of right now, I plan to show 2-Lane, an excerpted edit from Woodstock, and...Easy Rider, the film whose box-office success made the Hollywood suits open their wallets and finance a lot of very fresh, interesting movies that did not make much money.

[Johann]

I have Out of the Blue on Anchor Bay VHS.
What an ending! Not for the faint of heart...
Filmed in Vancouver B.C. too. Dennis Hopper is a Great man.
Jack Nicholson says "This film is a Masterpiece" on the sleeve.
I think I posted about it years ago?

I just saw Dennis in The Sons of Katie Elder the other day- getting roughed up by the Duke...
I'll always admire/respect Dennis Hopper.
An ARTIST.

[Johann]

And yes, you can't forget Peter Bogdanovich. What's Up Doc? has a scene that will make any student laugh- that dude who jumps over the fence to avoid the car chase- everytime I show it to someone they howl and say "Play that again!!!"
That stuntman fell HARD onto that table- I wonder if he was hurt....

I agree it's a very important period and some real American treasure came out of it.
Cassavetes must be taught.
Have you read Peter Biskind's stuff? He talks at great length about those "New American" movies.

Don't forget The Pom-Pom Girls! or The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings!
A side of the 70's peeps forget....LOL

[Chris Knipp]

I checked and Netflix doesn't even have Out of the Blue, though it is available for sale on DVD online in various editions. I have never seen it. Besides your recommendations, Roger Ebert wrote (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19820101/REVIEWS/201010301/1023) this in 1982:
"Out of the Blue" is one of the unsung treasures of independent films, a showcase for the maverick talents of two movie rebels: veteran actor Dennis Hopper, of "Easy Rider" and "Rebel Without a Cause," and young, tough-talking Linda Manz, whose debut in "Days of Heaven" was so heartbreaking. Made in 1979, it never got a chance in commercial theaters. The movie is Hopper's comeback as a director.

[oscar jubis]

Yeah, Dennis Hopper is worth my admiration and respect.

Double yeeah to "Cassavetes must be taught". I am "teaching" Shadows.

Biskind's book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is famous and popular. The subtitle goes like this: "How the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood". Biskind argues that subsequently this same generation either burned out or sold out with the result being this bloated, corporate, "Blockbuster Hollywood" we've had since Star Wars and Jaws. Certainly an opinionated and controversial book that is fun to read partly because of scabrous anecdotes. Biskind is a good writer. I just might assign a reading from it although Biskind often gets too "gossipy" for academic purposes.

I wouldn't mind seeing P.B.'s What's Up, Doc? again. Been a while. I also want to rewatch his Texasville.

Thanks for the Out of the Blue link, CK. Ebert concludes by saying: "This is a very good movie that simply got overlooked. When it premiered at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, it caused a considerable sensation, and Manz was mentioned as a front-runner for the best actress award. But back in North America, the film's Canadian backers had difficulties in making a distribution deal, and the film slipped through the cracks."

Rosenbaum on Out of the Blue on the occasion of Hopper's death:

"To make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, I recently took another look at Hopper’s previous film, Out of the Blue (1980). Here was proof, if any is needed, that a celebrated burnt-out case came back to establish himself as the legitimate American heir to the cinema of Nicholas Ray — a cinema of tortured lyricism and passionate rebellion that reached its fullest flower in the 50s, as if to match the action painting that was roughly contemporary with it. Hopper managed to remake Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (the film in which Hopper made his acting debut) in terms of a working-class punk (Linda Manz), an androgynous heroine whose grim fate suggested an Americanized version of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. Casting himself, moreover, as her dissolute father, Hopper gave himself a disturbing part that seemed to update his role as Billy in Easy Rider.

Originally hired to work on Out of the Blue solely as an actor, Hopper took over as director at the last minute. He fashioned an extraordinary movie with a minimum of time (a month of shooting, six weeks of editing) and money ($1.2 million, $780,000 of it reportedly Hopper’s own) that easily surpassed both Easy Rider (1969), and The Last Movie (1971) — his respectively overrated and underrated first two movies — as historical testimony and as aesthetic object. But very few people have ever heard of this late-blooming masterpiece, much less seen it. The fact that it belongs to that elephant graveyard of titles available on video doesn’t mean that it’s been validated by even the minimal cultural attention routinely given to every Sylvester Stallone release." [5/30/10]

[Chris Knipp]

I remember Shadows and how revolutionary and strange it seemed when it first appeared. It was premiered at Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 series in NYC and that's where (I think) I saw it. However I re-watched Easy Rider a few years ago with other movies of that time and found it very dated, while others (Five Easy Pieces for instance) are not. I see in your quote Rosenbaum says it's "overrated." I don't think it has held up well. Hopper was a big-time substance abuser -- as was Nick Ray. Who knows how much was lost for that reason of creative work both might have done. Not that both didn't produce memorable work, and Hopper built an amazing collection of modern art. Nick Ray and Dennis Hopper: two "glorious failures." Both important in the history of American film.

You won't mention Pauline Kael -- bofore your time and no longer fashionable, fashionable only to trash her -- but she championed the period you're talking about, and her big review of Bonnie and Clyde celebrated its seminal effect, but you haven't mentioned that either. I'd think it had a bigger effect than anything by Hopper. Of course it has no outlaw chic (despite being about genuine outlaws) since it turned a big profit. Kael to me made the Seventies seem like an exciting period in movies, when in some ways it wasn't. It was exciting to be able to read Pauline Kael's reviews every other week in The New Yorker. Not always so exciting to see the movies. I would not exchange that period with this but the crap machine is way bigger and better funded now, isn't it?

I recognize that Pauline's criticism (it's rather monumental though) is not pure gold, but neither is Rosenbaum's. It was she who made it exciting to think about movies during this period.

[oscar jubis]

I don't have anything to say about Kael I haven't said before. I respect the fact that you find/found reading her reviews to be exciting and that "Kael made it exciting to think about the movies during this period". I was certainly curious enough when she came to my attention in 1980 to go back and read her reviews from the 60s and 70s. Generally speaking, her writing didn't have the same effect on me that it had on you. You can respect that.
Five Easy Pieces may be better than Easy Rider but I have to go by recent experience with this movie and say that Easy Rider held up pretty well in my estimation. Ending still packs quite a punch and some of the improvised scenes are endlessly fascinating to me.
I also agree that a lot of 70s creative capital was wasted because of various kinds of excess.
I find movies to get excited about, movies to rewatch with pleasure in every decade. Don't want to generalize too sweepingly but there was something particularly fresh and different going on in and out of Hollywood in that late 60s to mid-70s period.

[Chris Knipp]

Okay, yeah.

I'm sorry we don't have any Kaels today. But there was only one really.

I'd agree that there's not much fresh and different coming out of Hollywood now if there ever was. At that time there was a bit more of an indie and less stdio machine flavor to some Hollywood films. You don't have to defend that period. I was only saying Easy Rider doesn't hold up as well as some of the others.

[Johann]

Why doesn't Easy Rider hold up Chris?
I think it's only dated in terms of 60's wardrobes (Phil Spector's glasses- what a laugh) & music.
But it still has a lot of power.
It still has the power to make one think and feel.

In Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" book he says that at the end, the audience has to reconcile the "freedom" on screen (two dead bikers) with the song playing: "The Ballad of Easy Rider"- very few movies have ever put a viewer in such a spot with it's end credits.


"Go for the big money and then you're Free"

Um, no you aren't.....

[Chris Knipp]

You would have to include this in a course in American movies of the period. Of course it has some excellent moments; Fonda was cool and stylish (though absent, a void) and Nicholson is always vivid and watchable (and here, the only articulate one). It's a good-looking movie (with cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs) and it has some good songs to back up the atmosphere. But it's weighed down with cliches, simplistic solutions, crude stereotypes. "This used to be a hell of a good country."
"No man, try this instead.
"You mean that's marijuana? Lord have mercy. Is that what that is?"
This kind of thing may have seemed fresh and daring at the time, but it's dated today. The idea of Peter Fonda as a sophisticate and role model -- he's just a drifter -- seems a bit weak today. No not weak. Laughable.

"Oh no man. What you represent to them is freedom."
"What the hell. That's what it's all about."
The ending is really an easy way out. When you get beyond the shock it feels slap-dash, thrown together, a flashy nihilistic gesture that might appeal to the Europeans at Cannes because they were in love with their analysis of it, not the actual limited content.

Easy Rider is an amalgam of B-picture elements. Motorcycles, scary rednecks, wild reveling, general posturing.

Dave Kehr's thumbnail for The Chicago Reader:
In the oldest, finest tradition of teenpics, Easy Rider (1969) became a hit with kids mainly because adults found it unwatchable. Director Dennis Hopper borrows from the avant-garde to suggest the LSD experience, and some of the trips have a definite flavor of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir—particularly in its narcissism and fatalism—of how the hippie movement thought of itself. This was the same year, remember, that Hopper played a heavy offed by John Wayne in True Grit. With Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Karen Black. R, 94 min.

It's just not one of my favorites, that's all. I lived on the edge of hippiedom myself and it just seems to me simplistic and corny. It seemed that to me back then, but people found it new and didn't see that side. Part of the excitement was wondering what the audience would think, as Kehr notes in his comment. Now that's gone.

It is, of course, a readymade perfect comparison in a class with Two-Lane Blacktop. The latter, because it's more empty and abstract, more "modernist" and less self-consciously "counter-cultural," has more artistic purity and meaning today.

Vincent Canby (the NYTimes movie reviwer of the time) was a "square" critic but it's very interesting what he wrote (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E0CE0D91538EF3BBC4D52DFB1668382679EDE) about Nicholson's character -- that he was so much more real than the others that after he is gone the film "never quite recovers from his loss, even though he has had the rather thankless job of spelling out what I take to be the film's statement (upper case)." This is exactly what I thought when I re-watched Easy Rider. I didn't like anything after Nicholson's death happened, particularly not the Mardi Gras and acid trip sequences. which are "Sixties" in the corniest, most dated sense.

Here's a thought: Easy Rider is On the Road with its energy and fresh eyes removed, stoned-out and dumbed-down. Easy Rider is a stoner story; On the Road is on speed. Easy Rider has to have Nicholson's character, an alcoholic, as a raisonneur one who articulates the ideas of the piece. And Nicholson's improvised stoned riff on Venusians having invaded earth is better than the whole LSD sequence. Watch for Walter Salles' coming film version of Kerouac's novel. It will be released next year: see the Coming Releases thread. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3125-COMING-RELEASES-2011-%28second-half%29)

Metacritic gives a little thumbnail from TV Guide from a re-release: "A finely observed film but insufficiently developed as a satire of middle America," and this is my thought too. It tells rather than shows, and gives out generalizations that a are too vague. TV Guide's comments are some slick fence-striding: "A must-see, if only once. More notable as a document of its times than as a piece of cinema, EASY RIDER is slack but powerful, sentimental yet scathing, experimental but predictable."

If Easy Rider is some kind of classic, it's one of those very, very flawed ones, and for somebody who lived through the period like me, it's just hard to watch again because I don't want to see the time summed up in such clichéd terms. Two-Lane Blacktop (which I still have to watch again) I think feels much more real to me, and also stylistically distinctive.

[Johann]

Jack's line "Lord have Mercy
Is that what that is?"

Is hilarious, and hilarity is never dated. Chaplin & Buster Keaton are testament to that.
That's sheer comedy- Jack's first toke.
UFO beamin' back At Ya!
It's like a cheech and chong moment- years before Up In Smoke.

[Johann]

I don't feel that Easy Rider dumbs anything down.
It's real in a lot of ways. It's of it's time and for all time.
Like Pennebaker's Monterey Pop.
Billy and Wyatt could've been heading there, instead of New Orleans.

[Chris Knipp]

I answered your question to the best of my ability. Niccholson is good,and his character has droll moments. Cheech and Chong jokes do not a great classic make. But Easy Rider is a classic of sorts, and a cultural milestone of a sort.

[oscar jubis]

After watching Easy Rider again last week, I like to think of it as a relentlessly vivid and interesting snapshot of America at a time when the deep societal divide in which we still find ourselves was most apparent. It is unfair to expect or demand any movie to sum up its era, even a movie whose success helped to save Hollywood,as Biskind argues. Easy Rider is a beautiful/horrible snapshot of its time as interpreted by Hopper and Fonda, mostly.

[Johann]

Have you been watching that Criterion box set Oscar?- the one with Easy Rider & The King of Marvin Gardens in it?
"America Lost and Found"?

[oscar jubis]

Yes, I have. Great set. Bob, Bert and Steve created a community of filmmaking during this era in order to make smart movies for young people. It worked, but only Head and Easy Rider made money so the ride ended when Hollywood stopped investing in BBS, choosing profit over quality and ushering the blockbuster era. Lots of enjoyable extras on every disc including commentaries from legends like Hopper, Nicholson and Rafelson.

[Johann]

Cool. I like sets like this. I saw it at HMV on Blu-Ray while browsing. Haven't seen Head or Drive, He Said.
I may buy it

[Chris Knipp]

I remember rather liking Drive, He Said; had enjoyed the novel by Jeremy Larner.