Red Line 7000 (1965)

Red Line 7000 is late Howard Hawks film. Made in 1965, it was his third-last movie. It’s probably his least admired movie.

Hawks wrote the original story and he produced and directed. Red Line 7000 deals with motor racing, but not with the glamorous world of Le Man or Formula 1. This is the slightly more disreputable world of NASCAR racing. This is certainly a deliberate choice by Hawks. He’s not interested in the glamour. He’s interested in what makes these men tick.

Hawks was fascinated by the idea of exploring the psychology of men who dice with death. He was particularly fascinated by men who dice with death even though they don’t have to. Not soldiers in wartime or cops driven by a sense of duty, but civilians who deliberately make this choice. They’re not doing it for a cause. They’re not doing it for the excitement. It’s more of an existential thing. They’re flirting with death, taunting death, spitting in the eyes of death. And all the time knowing that death will have the last laugh. Maybe they’re half in love with death.

Hawks was also fascinated by the women who love these men.

So the basic setup is there for a classic Howard Hawks movie. But that doesn’t seem to be what he had in mind. It seems like he was trying to make a movie aimed at a young audience. In fact it’s almost as if he tried to make a drive-in movie. There are some very definite exploitation movie elements. You have never seen so many car crashes. Every time the action moves to the racetrack you can be sure there will be crashes. Multiple crashes. Cars in flames. Cars going end over end.

This is the sort of thing a drive-in audience would love. But this was a major-studio picture distributed by Paramount and there was no way that Paramount would have had a clue how to market it.

It needed a Roger Corman to market it. It’s a movie that should have been made by AIP. Red Line 7000 was in fact shot on a very low budget. Mainstream critics were always going to hate it, and they did. Mainstream audiences would have been perplexed. Where are the big stars?

Which brings us to the cast. Hawks went for an entire cast of unknowns. The only big name is James Caan, but in 1965 he was not yet a star. Hawks presumably wanted to avoid having the movie loaded down with stars, which would have created the expectation that this was going to be a star vehicle for one or two big names. It isn’t. There’s no central character. There are eight or so important characters but the focus shifts constantly between them.

There are three drivers. Mike Marsh (James Caan) is the ice-cold professional who cares about nothing other than racing. Dan McCall (Skip Ward) had tried to break into Formula but now he’s back to NASCAR racing. Ned Arp (John Robert Crawford) is the hotshot punk, a nobody determined to be a somebody.

The first of the women is Julie (Laura Devon), the sister of the manager of the racing team. She falls for Ned Arp. The second is French girl Gabrielle (Marianna Hill). She had been Dan’s girlfriend but they’ve split up and now she has set her sights on Mike Marsh. The third is Holly (Gail Hire), who keeps falling in love with racing car drivers who keep dying on her. Now, to her horror, she has fallen in love with yet another race car driver (Dan).

The focus shifts constantly between each of the three couples and between the romantic dramas and the dramas on the racetrack.

Hawks sent his second unit director Bruce Kessler out to film actual race footage so all the racing scenes are real. And they’re spectacular.

The acting is a very mixed bag.

This movie ran into huge censorship problems over the relationship between Julie and Ned, something that now seems bizarre and inexplicable. Major cuts were made.

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this movie which doesn’t surprise me. I dislike Tarantino’s own movies but as a critic he’s perceptive and stimulating. He has, rightly, championed a lot of movies from the 60s and 70s that critics at that time were incapable of understanding.

Red Line 7000 is not quite what either Howard Hawks fans or mainstream audiences and critics expected but has its own oddball charm. I’m going to give it a highly recommended rating.

I’ve reviewed other Hawks movie dealing with similar themes. The Crowd Roars (1932) and Ceiling Zero (1936) are both underrated and very much worth seeing.