cult film freak: DIRECTOR HOWARD HAWKS RACE CAR MELODRAMA 'RED LINE 7000'

Title: RED LINE 7000 Stars: James Caan Director: Howard Hawks Rating: ***1/2

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 (right before shooting EL DORADO), it's well worth both watching and re-watching since there's so much going on... yet hardly on the actual racetrack...

In which Caan's one of several racers though mostly holed-up at a Holiday Inn and partaking in various affairs while driving for Norman Aldan, whose pretty tomboy sister Laura Devon winds up quickly bedded with the film's buried lead in muscular drone 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 instead...

Howard Hawks's RED LINE 7000

Caan who's the most contented and dependable, so much he often seems bored despite a natural screen presence, eventually winding-up in the arms of his future fictional brother's trophy wife, Marianna Hill from THE GODFATHER 2, a spurned French beauty who, like the other relationships mixed and matched throughout this sport genre melodrama, consists of couples basically 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-ready dames, also including Gail Hire (romanced by Skip Ward) as the jinxed widowed co-owner of a groovy hangout nightclub within this unapologetically basic and mellow hangout vehicle.