The Gumball Rally, The original and best
Not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but the car is king in 1976's The Gumball Rally, which makes it good enough for this list. Written partly as a comedy but mostly as a feature length tribute to supercars of the mid-seventies, the film started the comedic car race genre that spawned the likes of The Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit. Dopey cop Lieutenant Roscoe tries his hardest to stop the cast of generic token characters - including the young gear head (Ron Howard, aka Ritchie from Happy Days), the Italian lunatic and the pair of pretty young things in a Porsche 911 - from finishing the Gumball Rally, which is a coast-to-coast race across America from New York to California, where “there's no catalytic convertor and no 55mph speed limit”. Interestingly enough, that film quote was understood as a direct riposte to the blanket 55mph speed limit in force across America at the time.
The Gumball Rally is little more than an all-out exotic car speed-fest, with a few slapstick set pieces thrown in for good measure. The car list is pretty inspiring, including a 1974 Ferrari Daytona, a 1966 Ford Shelby Cobra, a 1974 Porsche 911 Targa and a 1970 Chevrolet Camaro Z28. All those flat-six, V8 and V12 engines bouncing off the high rise buildings of New York is a special aural blend. In fact, the New York streets were briefly closed to allow the actors to open up the supercars to speeds in excess of 100mph - a treat worth a thousand cheap gags to any proper car nut.
Still, there are a few quality set pieces in there, none more so than a running joke at Jaguar's expense. The story goes that the two girls in the Porsche Targa were supposed to be racing in a Jag E-Type, but Jaguar refused to loan the production company a car because it didn't want its car in the film. So, as a riposte to this mean attitude, the 'Jaguar joke' was born: throughout the race, a Jaguar E-Type driven by two clueless racers simply won't start, ever, and the hapless owners have no idea how to fix it. It's that sort of stuff that makes The Gumball Rally well worth checking out - it's not a classic, but it knows its audience.
Tuesday November 18
