Cinema: Descending Hawks

Red Line 7000. Among cinemaddicts abroad, Howard Hawks, 69, enjoys a reputation for directorial brilliance based on such classics as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and To Have and Have Not (1944). At home, Hawks’s recent work (Hatari!; Man’s Favorite Sport?) seems geared to earn profit without honor. So does Red Line 7000.

The plot, characteristically Hawksian, tells of the rough-and-ready guys who race stock cars and their turned-on track followers who cry, cheer and deliver romantic ultimatums that any dewy-eyed dropout might treasure. Scene after scene, brand names—Ford, Omega, Honda, Revell, Firestone, Grey-Rock brake linings—are dragged in like spare parts, as if to guarantee the authenticity of all that happens between location shots of screeching wheels and fiery crashes. “That was a close one . . . oh-oh, there’s another one!” cries the agitated track announcer, valiantly promoting the idea that death lurks at every curve, as advertised, whenever a tachometer needle reaches the redline mark for danger.

After the races, there are indoor sports at a Holiday Inn motel, played by a cast of hopefuls whose faces radiate the glossy anonymity of people in television commercials. Confusion is compounded by the fact that nearly every actor resembles someone else. James Caan, as a jealous driving champion, idles along in the Beatty-Newman-Brando tradition. Marianna Hill plays the Leslie Caron part, a French waif passed along to Caan by his track rival James Ward, who is a ringer for Doug McClure, who looks like Troy Donahue. Both on the track and in the sack, Red Line 7000 stresses the importance of luck—which must be the only hope for a movie put together with so little skill.