The Gumball Rally (1976) 106m
Fritz Lang once made the flip remark in a Godard film that widescreen was only good for shooting funerals or snakes. He might have added 'cars' to that observation. After thoroughly enjoying THE GUMBALL RALLY in a cinema when I was a kid, I was disappointed to find it flat and uninteresting many years later when I caught it on TV. It eventually took DVD and home cinema technology to bring me back to those big screen days and realize that size does matter, even to films that you wouldn't normally think of as 'big' movies. Okay, there are obvious choices: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, 2001, and anything by Sergio Leone. But THE GUMBALL RALLY? It's true there are no epic landscapes, casts of thousands, battle scenes, or big budgets, but there are those long desert highways and those cars - among others, a Ferrari, Cobra, Porsche, Camaro, Rolls-Royce, Mercedes and an E-type Jag (the most widescreen-friendly of all cars, which perversely doesn't even get out of the garage in this flick). It's great to see these beautiful machines roaring across the screen for over an hour, and this is the real appeal of GUMBALL RALLY. As the advertising of the time said: "The cars are the stars". This is not a film you see for its cast, but that works fine, and it's more believable seeing a lot of these second-string names at home in their cars than major Hollywood personalities playing it big.
The story is primitively simple - a group of car fanatics from all walks of life meet in New York to race each other to California (this was inspired by a real illegal coast-to-coast race, and in turn the movie had its name given to the GUMBALL 3000 rally many years later, which didn't honor the film's concept much by making it a trans-Europe celebrity event hyped up by the media). The angle for selling almost any film of this type is 'action comedy', but GUMBALL is relatively restrained, and in retrospective, the better for it. Wackiness is replaced with practicality - the actors are seen driving the cars through almost the entire time they're on the road and their dialogue is filmed live over the roar of the engine and whipping of the wind so that they have to shout to be heard. The cars get dustier and dirtier, the drivers become unshaven, and the story follows the progress of the cars over an evening, a night, and the following day. Director and stunt man Chuck Bail keeps the stunts simple in service of the story's realism, and while there are setbacks, nothing outlandish really happens - this is the kind of film where you might expect something as simple as a broken fan belt to lose the race, not some zany mishap that sees a car flying over a cliff or into a swimming pool. This is a surprising tack for any action comedy and the slapstick becomes funnelled into the only character who never speaks, a Hungarian motorcyclist who repeatedly loses control of his Kawasaki and bears the brunt of the stuntwork.
To provide a thread through the plot there is the standard nemesis cop who's out to bust the rally drivers (particularly long-time racers Michael Sarrazin and Tim McIntire), and who we naturally expect to be foiled at every turn by the cavalier racers, but who unexpectedly finds resolution in the final scene. It's therefore surprising to me to look back at my film diary and see that I thought GUMBALL was a 'very funny film' when I first viewed it (obviously I liked it enough to see it twice in one week). It's not so much 'funny' as 'fun' - the fact that the racers are not motivated by greed (there is no cash prize at the finish line) and are just racing for the sheer enjoyment of it gives the film an underlying sense of good cheer. Unlike many later imitators (notably the CANNONBALL RUN movies) GUMBALL does not feature a cast of comedians and/or cameos, although Raul Julia has no inhibitions hamming it up as an Italian playboy, and Gary Busey is amusing as a cheerfully irritating co-driver. I guess for adult viewers this leaves THE GUMBALL RALLY as an action comedy with not enough action and not enough comedy - so why would anyone want to watch it? Hey. What can I say? Ferrari. Cobra. Camaro...
sburridge@hotmail.com
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