“The range has become the highway, horses have been modernized through horse power, and filling stations and diners serve the function of townships where once Shane stopped. But still the southwest, the Route 40 trail, is where prowess can be asserted and competition prevails. It has been the half-comic, half-desperate basis of all Monte Hellman's films that man insists on finding a game to pass the time. If ‘Wild West' was once the favorite resort of America at play, then driving is one of its best successors. ‘Freedom's just another word'....there's nothing left to do. Driving seems like the exercise of liberty, an existential choice. But maybe it is as implacable as death, as much a given and an imprisoning track as two-lane blacktop. Whatever, the road is now the chief way in which we know and live in the West; and just as in Duel or American Graffiti, it is the natural frontier for danger, self-discovery and triumph.
“Two-Lane Blacktop was a commercial disaster when it was made. Its director Monte Hellman now has great difficulty finding pictures to make. But Blacktop and his other films--Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting, Cockfighter and China 9, Liberty 37--show a tenacious adherance to Western ritual, a disconcerting philosophical bleakness, and total faith in Warren Oates as a modern Western everyman. In Two-Lane Blacktop, Oates is a Pontiac-driver who meets and starts to race with two men and a girl in a '55 Chevy: it was the start of high concept movies.” David Thomson