Speeding away from the cops in, first, a souped-up 68 Chevy Impala, and then a garish Dodge Challenger, the trio bicker and banter relentlessly. Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke play two zero-to-100 holdup artists/racers who rob a huge supermarket, only to get saddled with the NASCAR groupie (Susan George) whom Fonda’s character bedded the night before. A very human tale that manages also to be a keen social satire. Hoping to bask in the glory of his hard-earned success, he attempts to drive it back to his village, only to meet many roadblocks along the way - much of them having to do with his own venality and materialism, as well as Turkey’s infamously horrendous drivers. Part The Bicycle Thieves, part The Old Man and the Sea, this little-known Turkish gem is a hilarious, poignant tale of a poor villager who goes to work in Germany and saves up to buy himself a beloved yellow Mercedes. The Luc Besson–led production company has also given us the Taken films, Lucy, and any number of other nutty, corny, go-for-broke action spectacles. That, of course, is the EuropaCorp house style. This is a fun, freewheeling, and oh-so-French action flick - the kind of movie that can slow down to ruminate on madeleines and Proust before proceeding with the mayhem. But over the years, he and the film have grown on us, gaining a wonderfully surreal, retroactive sheen.
Many of us underrated this movie at the time the silliness just seemed to be too much, and Statham’s stoic demeanor felt stiff, despite his considerable physical prowess.
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Jason Statham, who has now joined the Fast and Furious franchise, scored his first franchise playing an expert driver who gets paid to transport cargo - any kind of cargo, no questions asked. Though quite different in tone and style, the Fast and Furious movies owe a lot to this bubbly cult classic. Most importantly, the central heist and its ludicrous aftermath are delightfully well-executed. It’s an odd, silly little movie, but it’s filled with charming bits, from Noel Coward as an aristocratic gangster to Benny Hill as a pervy prof to Quincy Jones’s jazzy score. “ You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” Cockney con man Michael Caine, recently released from the clink, puts together a truly ludicrous heist to steal $4 million in Mafia gold bullion from the middle of Turin using Mini Coopers. Give him a hot rod, and he’s suddenly cooler. The film may not have the authentic details of those classic car movies that would start to come out a decade or so later, but Mitchum is, and will always be, the coolest cat onscreen. This wasn’t a fanciful movie creation it was an actual subculture. In this classic 1958 noir set in the world of illegal mountain moonshiners, Robert Mitchum plays a young vet working as a transporter - one of “those wild and reckless men, who transport illegal whisky from its source to its point of distribution,” using souped-up cars. Plus, let’s face it, the soundtrack is cool. And using an almost comically inexpressive Ryan Gosling (playing a stunt-driver-cum-getaway-driver, not unlike Ryan O’Neal in The Driver), he builds elaborate, deadpan set pieces that are unnerving in the way they promise graphic, brutal horrors that the film only occasionally shows.
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Director Nicolas Winding Refn knows how to shoot violence, but more important, he knows how to anticipate violence. This movie isn’t quite the masterpiece it was billed as at the time, but it is a fascinating blend of pop influences - the terse gearhead classics of the ’70s, the New Age stylings of the ’80s, the hip irony of the millennial era. Directed by Elliot Silverstein, this cult horror flick was a late-show mainstay: Any kid switching channels late at night in the ’80s when those ominous “Dies Irae” chords came on knew he or she was in for something special.
But that’s kind of its genius, too: Because this car does all sorts of things a car could never actually do, you never quite know what to expect. Utterly ridiculous, at times laughably so. A black automobile, presumably from the depths of Hell, terrorizes a small town, and it’s local lawman James Brolin’s job to stop it. This is basically Jaws with a car, and it’s just as loony as that sounds.
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