Our film critic Sam Adams contributed two essays to The B-List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love, out now on Da Capo Press. Read Adams' essay on Neil Young's Greendale here. Racing flat-out on the road to nowhere, the scrawny speed demons of Two-Lane Blacktop are caught between a past they've never known and a future they'll never see. The Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) act the part of rebels from a '50s exploitation movie, but their sallow skin and sunken eyes reveal the gnawing uncertainty of a disillusioned age, a longing for a sense of purpose that exists only in the seconds between starting flag and finish line. Universal, which handed director Monte Hellman $900,000 to make his first (and, as it turned out, only)...
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