Two-Lane Blacktop

James Taylor is the Driver and Dennis Wilson is the Mechanic -- a street-racing team in a '55 Chevy that prowls the back roads looking for private races and side bets. To call them gypsies is to romanticize an empty existence: These guys are disconnected from 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. 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. 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 greatest road movie ever made, a modern Western without frontiers, only paved trails that go everywhere and lead nowhere, and four figures on the road to nowhere who can't work up enough speed to escape themselves. In the words of the Driver: "You can never go fast enough."

The great American existential road movie is given the Criterion treatment in this superb two-disc special edition. Filmmaker and fan Allison Anders ("Grace of My Heart") joins Hellman on one of the disc's two commentary tracks, playing moderator and host with observations and questions. Wurlitzer is joined by writer David Meyer on a very low-key second track that plays more like a sleep interview. "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, and Hellman himself interviewing Taylor (who has still never seen the film) and Kris Kristofferson (whose song "Me and Bobby McGee" is part of the soundtrack). There are also more interviews, recently rediscovered screen test outtakes with Bird and Taylor, a booklet with new and archival essays, and a reprint of Wurlitzer's screenplay.