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Great car flick from 1971...

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Somehow I never got a chance to see Two-Lane Blacktop, a 1971 flick starring singer James Taylor and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.

The plot is very loose, and you are either going to love or hate the film on its merits as a film, but as a nostalgic snapshot of the muscle car era, I've never seen a better movie. It was shot on the road, starting in LA and following Route 66 roughly into OK, then over to East Tennessee.

Taylor is "The Driver" and Wilson is "The Mechanic". They basically drift from town to town drag racing for money in their very cool, primer gray '55 Chevy with a dual 4bbl, tunnel ram 454 in it. Along the way, they keep encountering Warren Oates in a 1970 GTO Judge. They eventually agree to race to Washington DC for pink slips.

Apparently the director recruited locals in each town along the way to populate the car scenes. There is a simply incredible array of classic muscle cars, including a Charger Daytona, Hemi 'Cudas, a 454 El Camino SS, etc. I kept pausing and rewinding to look at the cars in the background. Oddly, there are very few Mustangs, in fact, I can't recall a single one. There was a Torino GT with the weird fading neon stripe in the background of one scene though, and a couple of Cougars. There are also a couple of shots of classic funny cars.

If you are looking for action, you'll be bored, because the movie is a classic late-60's/early-70's metaphorical mess, but it is worth seeing just for the cars.

Of course, I had to look up what happened to the '55, and they had three of them. Hard to believe, but the one used for exterior shots sold for only $25K about 15 years ago. The one used for the road shots and interior scenes just sold at Barrett-Jackson last month for $160K!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067893/

http://www.barrett-jackson.com/Archive/Event/Item/1955-CHEVROLET-CUSTOM--TWO-LANE-BLACKTOP-179962
 

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