Hot-rod Hoodlums: The Best and Worst of Early Car Movies

The phrase "cars and the movies" has almost as much of a show-business ring as "light, cameras, action." From Laurel and Hardy and the Keystone Kops, to "Goldfinger," "Goldeneye," and "The Solid Gold Cadillac," automobiles have served as major plot elements since the beginning of filmmaking. And if an automobile just happened to be the right car at the right time, like Herbie the Love Bug or Steven King's Christine, it just might score a leading role.

The cars-on-screen theme has taken many shapes throughout the history of film, from the serious to the sublime, and sometimes the sensational. But a unique genre of spectacularly marginal filmmaking sprouted up just after World War II. These low-budget barnstormers centered around hot cars, cool music, and a rebellious American youth with a need for independence and expression. Call them what you will: "hot-rod flicks" or the more philosophical "exploitation films," they started showing up around 1950. By the middle of that decade, the typical low-budget, no-name-actor, hot-cars-and-fast-girls movie was being churned out of Hollywood's backlots at the rate of about one per week. The fervor raged for over 10 years, until the increasingly violent and graphic biker films gave nervous parents a new, more serious reason to keep their teen-agers in at night.

The tastiest of the breed were the numerous "B"-rated black-and-whiters of the now-so-nostalgic '50s and early '60s. You know, the ones with names like "Hot Rod Girl" and "Dragstrip Riot." Remember such pearls as "Running Wild" and Speed Crazy"? Most titles had "Hot," "Rod," "Dragstrip," "Car," or "Girl" contained in them somewhere. "They were the automotive versions of gunfighter themes," says Tim Considine, a child-actor-turned-writer who played Spin on the Mickey Mouse Club's series, "The Adventures of Spin & Marty." Considine was a part of Hollywood car and movie circles at an early age; he remembers with great fondness these films and the people who made them.