Word: blacktopping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot is an offhand affair about a hot-shot California tennis player (Beau Bridges) afflicted with the same psychogenic pestilence that has raged through so many other contemporary movies (Five Easy Pieces, Two-Lane Blacktop). The tennis player has a smashing girl friend (Maud Adams), who turns him on but threatens to tie him down. His career is lucrative but unfulfilling. Even when his beloved coach and manager (Gilbert Roland) dies, he is incapable of feeling much more than self-pity. So with characteristic cool, he embarks on a course of suicide...
Burk Uzzle, a former Life photographer and current member of Magnum Photos, Inc., leads us on a tour of pop and chrome America. Oblique lines on a parking lot lead us to a lone horse-rider on blacktop; an arrow directs us past a rooster on a traffic island. Emphasizing design and pure form, Uzzle illustrates an econoline van making it a highly disciplined composition--circular wheels, white slab body that flows into each white side of the frame, and black geometric solids surround the white...
...shrewdly sizes him up and, chameleonlike, takes on a completely new identity, one that he hopes will impress his listener. Spinning out fantasies about imaginary pasts, GTO becomes by turns a gambler, a television producer, a racer, a war hero. The role of GTO in the movie Two Lane Blacktop calls for virtuoso acting, and gets it-from a 43-year-old veteran of a hundred movie and television westerns named Warren Gates. Still little known to the public, Oates is now being described by directors as a new Paul Muni, a John Garfield, a Humphrey Bogart...
...Oates never got rave reviews until Blacktop. They were followed by more critical praise for his compassionate portrayal of Arch in The Hired Hand, directed by and starring Peter Fonda. Arch is the man in the middle, caught between a deep friendship with a farmer and a newborn love for the farmer's wife. Oates is totally convincing in the role, struggling within himself and weighing each relationship against his own moral code...
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...