Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop was last released to home video in an Anchor Bay edition that came out on VHS and DVD in 1999, and it's been out of print for the better part of the twenty-first century. This past week, the movie has been released in a handsome, "director-approved", two-disc edition from the Criterion Collection, and this news will divide the public into two groups: the ones who are turning cartwheels down Main Street and the ones asking, "What's that about Diane Lane's black top?" It was always thus. When the movie was about to be released in the summer of 1971, Esquire put its female lead, Laurie Bird, on the cover of an issue that included the text of the entire shooting script, along with the claim that this readymade cult item was destined to become "the movie of the year." Six months later, that claim was included in the magazine's annual "Dubious Achievements" feature. Hellman's scheduled follow-up project, to direct Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from a script by novelist and Blacktop screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer, was quickly reassigned to Sam Peckinpah.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how the studio and the media might have gotten their hopes up that they had the next big thing on their hands. It's also easy to see why those hopes were so quickly dashed. Two-Lane Blacktop was produced by Universal as part of its short-lived "youth division", which was set up as a direct reaction to the success of such films as Easy Rider and the old studio bosses' dawning realization that they had no idea what the kids out there wanted to see. Whatever they wound up making in this case, it sure isn't Easy Rider, and it's harder now than it must have been in 1971 to see that as a failing. It is in fact a mesmerizing film, especially if you just stumble across it--as your humble correspondent did when, as a sleep-deprived adolescent, he first encountered it on TV one night around four AM--but it was probably always too abstract for mass popularity, and it doesn't flatter anyone on either side of the generation gap the way the big counterculture hits did. As Dennis Lim points out in his appeciation of the film the director Richard Linklater has described it as being both the last film the 1960s and the first film of the 1970s, and he has a point. It does feel as if it were taking place in the wake of something and that it marks the subsequent beginning of something, something uncertain and with wide-open possibilities that may or may not be acted upon. (By contrast Easy Rider looks and feels like something that Time once did a cover story on, back before you could read.)

Our heroes are the nameless driver (played by lanky-haired James Taylor--yeah, the singer), who pilots his '55 Chevy from town to town getting into drag races for money, his mechanic (Dennis Wilson, of the Beach Boys), and Laurie Bird (a non-actress with a period-specific look) as the girl they pick up hitching. This near-mute trio meet up with Warren Oates, an older man in a GTO who seems to regard their existence as some insufferable challenge to his very being, and they agree to race him to Washington, D.C., with the loser agreeing to forfeit his car to the winner. But this turns out to be not so much an actual plot as an excuse to keep the characters tearing across the back roads, taking in the scenery and interacting (or, in the case of Taylor and Wilson, not interacting) with a procession of folks who briefly drop into the movie and drop out again. (One of them is Harry Dean Stanton, who has a memorably squirmy encounter with Oates.)

Seen now, the movie has a special tension that develops between the characters and the landscape they pass through. The small roadside lunch counters and empty country roads have the attraction of an lost, unexplored, now unexplorable America, yet neither the driver nor his mechanic nor the motormouth "GTO" seem to be really interested in taking it in. They just want to keep in motion, perhaps as a distraction from the fact that they obviously aren't going anywhere. Taylor and Wilson don't seem able to focus on anything beyond their forelocks, and their antagonist is busy tailoring and re-tailoring his fantasy persona; he sees every meeting with a new person as a curtain going up, reeling off a different back story for everyone who steps into his car. Oates was in full bloom as a character star in 1971, and his funny, strangely beautiful performance here serves the movie well, even as it turns it on its head. This middle-aged fantasist, who might be the last of the Beats--the one who never got off the road long enough to write his book-- envies Taylor and Wilson for their youth and inscrutable cool and longs for their approval, but he takes the movie away from them as easily as breathing. The younger men are locked inside their affectless poses, cool in a way that looks comatose. Maybe someday, if they ever develop their imaginations, and they'll be so regretful about all the things they've passed through without noticing it that they'll be trying to fill in the blanks of their past by making up stories about it, like GTO. Maybe not; maybe the simulated immolation of the film print that ends the picture amounts to the burning out of whatever life is in them.

Now that it's once again available for home viewing, and just in time for Christmas, Two-Lane Blacktop is primed to excite and bewilder people again. Here's hoping that a lot of people whose families know that they like racing pictures and "Sweet Baby James" are going to find this beautifully packaged DVD under the tree next week, just waiting for the chance to perplex and bewilder them. The circle of life continues.