Hollywood Revs Up Its Love Affair With Fast Cars

Once again, theaters reverberate with the screams of engines. Renny Harlin’s “Driven,” starring Sylvester Stallone, revved up the season with a melodrama of Championship Auto Racing Teams that soon ran out of gas. Now “The Fast and the Furious” roars in, to depict young outlaws who race their gleaming rods through the streets of Los Angeles.

Motion pictures and motorcars arrived in the world almost simultaneously, as the most overpowering manifestations of the machine age, so automobiles and motorcycles have long captured the minds of filmmakers. Wild rides became the stuff of comedies, even though inaudible in the silent era, as flivvers puffed and bounced across the screen.

That cars were already proving a mixed blessing is illustrated in a W.C. Fields classic short. The victim of arrogant drivers, Fields strikes back after coming into money. “Road hogs,” he growls, after bashing into offending motorists.

Gangster movies of the ‘30s abound in what would later be called “drive-bys.” Cars also became a symbol of romance and a source of suspense. Alfred Hitchcock used them with great success in films ranging from “Suspicion” to “To Catch a Thief,” both with Cary Grant at the wheel. In the first, Grant’s Johnnie Aysgarth inspires fears that he is out to murder Joan Fontaine’s Lina MacLaidlaw, and frightens her out of her wits with a ride along a road high above the sea. In the second, Grant’s John Robie, a reformed cat burglar, takes us on a thrilling race above the Riviera.

The big era for cars was the ‘50s. Hitchcock made “To Catch a Thief” in 1955, but it was almost old-fashioned in a decade when youth revolt began to dominate the screen. The two most famous and definitive movies of the period were the 1953 “The Wild One” and the 1955 “Rebel Without a Cause.” In the later film, James Dean underlined the perils of fooling around with cars in Nicholas Ray’s still unnerving staging of the fatal “chickie run.” In the earlier, hugely influential film (said to influence “Rebel”), Marlon Brando indelibly created the quintessential biker outlaw, despite a gray hat that looked a bit absurd (Lee Marvin’s scruffy outfit is more credible). Dragging for beers down a main street of a terrorized town gives the Laslo Benedek-Stanley Kramer tale of the Black Rebels its kick.

Cars and motorcycles loomed even larger in the career of Steve McQueen. The 1968 “Bullitt,” directed by Peter Yates, propelled McQueen to the top, with its spectacular (and seminal) car chase over the hills of San Francisco. But McQueen had already established himself as a king of motorized action with his hair-raising biking in John Sturges’ 1963 “The Great Escape.”

Two other icons in the men-and-motors genre (the car-race picture is a different, finally more limited genre) are Gene Hackman, for his chase of a killer on an elevated train in “The French Connection” and, of course, Robert Mitchum, for his hard-driving bootlegger, outrunning the Feds, in “Thunder Road.” The cars are louder, faster and more colorful now, but they pale beside the street cars and back-road hot rods of yesteryear.