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The overture sketches a calamitous street race in an uncanny bridge of late Fifties and late Sixties, a sharper compression of the gearhead netherworld than all of American Graffiti. The brooder has the look of a hardened juvenile who at one point could have played James Dean's brother, and sure enough there's Dick Davalos' pomaded skull inside the helmet, catnip for the Figure 8 promoter (Brian Donlevy) seeking bodies to feed the machine. "Where do you manage to find these guys?" "There's a suicide born every minute." Not the circles of regular tracks but intersecting routes made for collisions, where the champ (Sid Haig) is a wild braggart "dingy as there is." A derivation from Rossen's The Hustler perfectly suited to Jack Hill's immersion in the metallic milieu, crashers and yearners and exploiters in the perpetual loops of grease and blood. Virtually Roman in its viciousness, the contest is documented in vivid swaths of spinning and clanging, rough abstractions to fill up the maelstrom-arena. (The vehicle that leaves the stadium whole is demolished by the competitor's ax, a beguiling spectacle of its own.) "Oh, for the life of a driver." Haig shades wounded resonance into extroverted freakishness while Ellen Burstyn in oil-stained jumpsuit rehearses her gaze of tacit desire for The Last Picture Show, Beverly Washburn sliding a jawbreaker from side to side in her wide maw embodies a midpoint between Rita Tushingham and Shelley Duvall. Junkyards, discotheques, il deserto grigio that reflects the protagonist's void: "Is there any place in this world where there aren't any old beer cans?" The ending outclasses the concurrent Downhill Racer in its snapshot of sporting casualties and hollow winners. With George Washburn, Steve Pendleton, Ted Duncan, Titus Moede, and George Barris. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |