One of the strangest race car movies of all time is also the most grounded, deliberately mundane, and, directed by an old Howard Hawks starring a young James Caan, its worth both watching and re-watching since there's so much going on... yet barely on the racetrack...
In which Caan's one of several racers holed up at a Holiday Inn and partaking in various affairs while driving for Norman Aldan, whose tomboy sister Laura Devon winds up quickly bedded with the film's buried lead in muscular John Robert Crawford, whose rushed backstory of a farm boy wanting to be the fastest takes away from an against-the-odds story that should have been Caan's role...
Instead he's the most contented and dependable of the drivers, and often seems bored despite his natural screen presence, eventually winding up in the arms of his future brother's trophy wife, Marianna Hill from THE GODFATHER 2, a spurned foreign beauty who, like the other relationships mixed and matched throughout this sport genre melodrama, consists of mismatched couples bickering till they bang...
But what makes RED LINE 7000 shine despite the lack of plot and action is its colorful 1960's template, looking more 1967 than 1965, a two-fold time-piece showcasing that era's womanizing yet equally vulnerable playboy types and their reluctant-till-their-not dames, also including Gail Hire as a "widowed" co-owner of the kind of groovy nightclub that's neat to hang-around in within this mellow hangout vehicle.
In which Caan's one of several racers holed up at a Holiday Inn and partaking in various affairs while driving for Norman Aldan, whose tomboy sister Laura Devon winds up quickly bedded with the film's buried lead in muscular John Robert Crawford, whose rushed backstory of a farm boy wanting to be the fastest takes away from an against-the-odds story that should have been Caan's role...
Instead he's the most contented and dependable of the drivers, and often seems bored despite his natural screen presence, eventually winding up in the arms of his future brother's trophy wife, Marianna Hill from THE GODFATHER 2, a spurned foreign beauty who, like the other relationships mixed and matched throughout this sport genre melodrama, consists of mismatched couples bickering till they bang...
But what makes RED LINE 7000 shine despite the lack of plot and action is its colorful 1960's template, looking more 1967 than 1965, a two-fold time-piece showcasing that era's womanizing yet equally vulnerable playboy types and their reluctant-till-their-not dames, also including Gail Hire as a "widowed" co-owner of the kind of groovy nightclub that's neat to hang-around in within this mellow hangout vehicle.