Wheels: Hi Test

By J.C.

"I keep picking up these fantasies all along the road.''

--G.T.O. in Two-Lane Blacktop

He hasn't got it quite right. The road is really an escape route. When G.T.O. stops his sleek and speedy Pontiac to pick up hitchhikers along his way to anywhere, it is reality he is letting in. Talking to his passengers--a faggot cowpuncher, a grandmother caring for a newly orphaned child, a couple of soldiers on leave--he attempts to draw them into his own baroque imagination. He is by turns an ex-fighter pilot, a gambler, a test driver from Detroit. It is only clear about G.T.O. that whatever road he takes, he will always be lost.

For another set of characters, the Driver and the Mechanic, the endless macadam stretching cross-country is nothing less than a lifeline. They seal themselves inside their '55 Chevy and look to make money at racing. They pick up a girl who has been scuffling around the back roads. Inevitably, they meet up with G.T.O. The challenge comes quickly: race all the way from

New Mexico to Washington, D.C., winner take the pink slips--possession of the cars, which, for each of them, are vehicles either of dreams or destruction.

Director Monte Hellman has taken this kind of chopped and channeled mythology and turned it into an American pop epic called Two-Lane Blacktop. The film is immaculately crafted, funny and quite beautiful, resonant with a lingering mood of loss and loneliness. There are extended pauses and dialogue exchanges full of deliberate paradox. Few film makers have dealt so well or so subtly with the American landscape. Not a single frame in the film is wasted. Even the small touches--the languid tension while refueling at a back-country gas station or the piercing sound of an ignition buzzer--have their own intricate worth.

Full Velocity. Two-Lane Blacktop does suffer from a certain overfamiliarity. After Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and their sundry imitators, the American highway as a metaphor has become a pretty well-traveled route. But Two-Lane Blacktop is full of its own surprises. Rock Stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are fine as the Driver and the Mechanic: Taylor's gaunt face and haunted eyes and Wilson's strong, oblique presence suit Hellman's purposes perfectly.

Best of all is Warren Gates as G.T.O. His face is familiar from a decade of playing honkies, hillbillies and the leading man's saddle buddy. The wide-ranging talent given expression only intermittently in those secondary roles is here used at full velocity and flat-out: he is funny and crazy, bitter, wistful and tragic. It is a performance that places him among the finest American film actors.

In its last five minutes, the movie falls off into an inevitable but rather glib denouement. The girl (Laurie Bird) leaves the group and starts her wandering again, but since her role has always seemed merely functional, the de parture is something less than shattering.

That the fadeout is strangely chilly and unaffecting does riot prevent Two-Lane Blacktop from being one of the most ambitious and interesting American films of the year. .J.C.

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