I was trying to do something, I tried an experiment. I had three good stories about the race track – I used to race, I know it pretty well – but none of them would make a picture, so I thought maybe I can put them together. And just when I got people interested in two people, I cut over and started to work with two more, and when the audience got interested in them, I went over to two others, and pretty soon the audience got disgusted and I got disgusted too. To be serious, I think there were some pretty good things in it, but as a piece of entertainment I don’t think I did a good job. I think there were some individual scenes that were pretty good, and there were a lot of great race scenes. But I’m not proud of the picture as a whole.
Howard Hawks interviewed by Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, Sight and Sound, Spring 1971
Red Line 7000 is perhaps, in Britain at least, the most under-estimated film of the sixties. The critics more or less ignored it, the public (who hadn’t heard of any of the actors) kept away. Hawks himself dislikes it: it is difficult to see why. It is an intensely personal film, based on an original Hawks story and showing in its realisation every mark of close involvement; Hawks’s statement that he lost interest in it is belied by every shot. It has precisely what its two immediate predecessors lacked: the degree of creative intensity that prompts a consistent exactness of touch, a tautness and economy and sense of relevance in the total organisation. With its coherence goes a youthful vitality not entirely attributable to the (on the whole) admirably energetic and responsive young cast (though they doubtless proved an important stimulus). The tension and economy in the whole cinematic complex – dialogue, acting, use of camera, editing – are untypical of late Hawks, though every sequence is unmistakably Hawksian.
In any work of art one’s response to local realisation is a more reliable guide to evaluation than a generalised sense of what the work is about. Examine any sequence of Red Line 7000, and you will find an unfailing rightness in the direction, corresponding to Hawks’s sense of what is important in the action at any given moment. Look, particularly, at the sequences where the Mike/Gaby relationship is worked out; or at (a model of economical exposition) the early scenes between Laura Devon and John Robert Crawford. Indeed, the economy throughout the film is such that one feels Hawks was trying to see how much he could leave out – or, alternatively, how much he could pack in; seldom in a film can so much ground have been covered in so short a time.
One particularly interesting feature of Red Line 7000 is the world in which it is set. It is, characteristically, a world apart, yet it bears a remarkably close relation to certain of the more ‘advanced’ aspects of modern civilisation. The action of the film is played out against a background of machines, transistor radios, pop music and brand names: the sense of impermanence characteristic of the adventure films (for instance, Only Angels Have Wings) is here linked to the impermanence about us. Only Hawks, perhaps, among great artists – with his ‘primitive’ qualities, and his lack of interest in tradition – could face that impermanence in so positive a spirit of acceptance; that he can do so suggests both his strength and his limitations. After the slightly old-fashioned quality of Man’s Favourite Sport?, Red Line 7000 comes across as an intensely modern film: its principle of precariousness and impermanence relates right back to Only Angels Have Wings, yet at the same time is very much of the sixties. Much of the film’s excitement derives from its surprising juxtaposition of mechanised civilisation and intense instinctive vitality – the vitality, as in Only Angels Have Wings, deriving partly from the sense of impermanence, and its resultant tension and exhilaration.
In dealing thus with the groundwork of Red Line 7000, one is not claiming any profundity for the extractable moral-metaphysical ideas, which are quite simple and straightforward, though never stupid or trivial. Hawks is an artist, not a ‘thinker’; the fact that nothing in Red Line 7000 is incompatible with the idea that the moral-metaphysical basis was quite unconscious is simply the measure of how completely he is an artist. All the ‘meaning’ of the film is implicit in the action, never imposed on it. There is no obtrusive symbolism, the camera is at no point used to force a point of view on the spectator. Hawks is perhaps too completely an artist for many critics to see that he is one at all: they need some symbols and ‘striking’ camera-angles and overt moral points flourished at them before they think they’re seeing anything significant. The greatness of Hawks’s films lies not in the extractable moral viewpoint itself, but in the intensity with which it is felt and realised in concrete terms.
Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (revised edition, BFI, 1981)
A contemporary review
Stock car racing provides Hawks with another good excuse for exploring his favourite mystique – men who live dangerously, and the women who watch, love and wait. The track scenes are rather perfunctory, though excitingly shot (particularly the crashes), and Hawks concentrates almost exclusively on a tangle of love affairs where the characters fall instantaneously in and out of love with alarming regularity in a variety of decorative sets. It should all be faintly ridiculous, but somehow – partly the old Hawksian knowhow, partly the sympathetically written dialogue – it manages to be immensely engaging. Nearly all the intimate scenes have a quiet, probing conviction, and as played by a largely unknown cast bringing genuine freshness and warmth (Gail Hire, Marianna Hill and Charlene Holt in particular), the conventionally conceived characters become clothed with real flesh and blood.
For a time, as more and more characters are introduced, compensating for the absence of a plot by bringing in more and more complications, there seems to be no reason why Red Line 7000 should ever end: like Hatari!, it is a film capable of infinite expansion (or contraction). In the last reel, unfortunately, somebody presumably decided it was high time to force an ending of sorts, and the film disintegrates into silly melodrama, with a final sequence which clumsily hammers home the waiting women theme. The colour, incidentally, is excellent throughout.
Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1966
Red Line 7000
Directed by: Howard Hawks
©: Paramount Pictures Corporation, Laurel Productions
A Paramount picture
Presented by: Howard Hawks
Produced by: Howard Hawks
Unit Production Manager: Andrew J. Durkus
2nd Unit Director: Bruce Kessler
Assistant Director: Dick Moder
Screenplay by: George Kirgo
Based on a story by: Howard Hawks
Director of Photography: Milton Krasner
Special Photographic Effects: Paul K. Lerpae
Film Editors: Stuart Gilmore, Bill Brame
Art Direction: Hal Pereira, Arthur Lonergan
Set Decorations: Sam Comer, Claude E. Carpenter
Property Master: Earl Olin
Costumes: Edith Head
Makeup Supervision: Wally Westmore
Hair Style Supervision: Nellie Manley
Process Photography: Farciot Edouart
Music Composed and Conducted by: Nelson Riddle
Sound Recording: John Carter, John Wilkinson
Sound Editor: Keith Stafford
The producer is grateful for the co-operation of: Nascar Inc.
Cast
James Caan (Mike Marsh)
Laura Devon (Julie Kazarian)
Gail Hire (Holly MacGregor)
Charlene Holt (Lindy Bonaparte)
John Robert Crawford (Ned Arp)
Marianna Hill (Gabrielle ‘Gabby’ Queneau)
James Ward (Dan McCall)
Norman Alden (Pat Kazarian)
George Takei (Kato)
Diane Strom (waitress)
Anthony Rogers (Jim Loomis)
Idell James (server)
Cissy Wellman (waitress)
Carol Connors (singer)
John Gabriel (driver from Carolina)
Robert Donner (driver from Carolina)
Ann Morell (brunette in bar)
Teri Garr (singing waitress) *
USA 1965©
110 mins
Video
*Uncredited
The screening on Mon 14 Apr will include an introduction by season programmer Karina Longworth
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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