Died: April 20, 2021. MONTE Hellman, who has died aged 91, was a film director who became the ultimate outsider. One of a generation of auteurs to have come of artistic age on the back of the post-Second World War US counterculture, his work was equally in tune with European philosophical sensibilities. The fusion of the two made for a brooding and ennui-laden canon that chimed with the times. This was seen best in Two-Lane Blacktop, (1971), an existential road movie starring singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson alongside Laurie Bird and semi-regular Hellman collaborator, Warren Oates. The British film critic, Philip French, later described it as an “existential masterpiece”.