Redline 7000

Howard Hawks – 1965 – USA

Extremely odd late Hawks film that returns him to the territory of his far superior racing drama The Crowd Roars (1932) with James Cagney.  Redline 7000 has a definite formalist appeal, but it is conspicously missing a transient ease or confidence that can be felt so vividly in Hawks’ next film, El Dorado (1966), for example.  [You can compare those two consecutive films to Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) and Frenzy (1972); the former being a strained attempt to reclaim past glory, while the latter happily and confortably revives everything we love about the director’s work.]  James Caan plays a brash young star of the stock-car circuit, and the professional and romantic melodrama that plays out between his friends and the women in their lives provide the meat of the plot.  In this last phase of his career, Hawks was convinced – (to a large extent by the success of television) – that audiences were hungry for protracted stories about human relationships rather than concise plots.  When he put this idea to use in films like Rio Bravo (1959) and Hatari! (1962), there’s no doubt that he was on to something.  In laborious and weak films like Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964) and Redline 7000, however, he only seems more old-fashioned than ever.  To be fair, the film certainly has its admirers, not the least of which was the great critic Robin Wood, who claimed until his dying day that Redline 7000 was a misunderstood masterwork.