Almost legendary for its inherent
campiness and overheated dramatics, today's film Hot Rods to Hell
(1967) is a hilariously high-gear trip that will drive you to fits of
hysterical laughter, especially if you have a buddy on hand who
appreciates the absurd as much as you do.
Let's get something clear from the
start. The movie's poster is an outright cheat. Rather obviously (and
quite poorly) cobbled together, it cuts and pastes people and
situations together that simply do not happen in the movie! It looks
here as if the brunette in the center is about to be assaulted by a
pair of hungry lipstick lesbians. Not only is there no such moment,
but there is also not one leather jacket to be found in the film on
any character. Also, the embracing couple in the car below are not in
this movie. At all. Instead, we are given three wayward teens,
dressed in colorful shirts, chinos and so on, who cause a bit of
havoc for a family of four during a cross-country trip.
But let's start at the beginning. It's
Christmastime in Boston and housewife Jeanne Crain, along with her
children Laurie Mock and Jeffrey Byron, is awaiting the arrival of
husband and father Dana Andrews, a traveling salesman who is on his
way home after an extended trip.
He calls to tell them he will be back
soon and is loaded down with Christmas presents (which, for some
reason, he chooses to cradle up near his face while speaking to them
on the phone! Yes, I know it's so they will make it into the camera
frame, but Andrews isn't supposed to know that!)
It's all fun and frolic as Byron places
his Santa beard onto his sister Mock (creating the second scariest
movie St. Nick ever, exceeded only by Lucille Ball wearing a Santa
Claus mask in Mame, 1974!)
Crain overreacts to this little bit of
pranksterism, giving us a glimpse of what is to come (which is her
decision to infuse every third line reading with a deranged,
wild-eyed expression and plenty of head/hair swinging!) To be fair,
this may also be the face Crain made when her agent delivered the
script to her...
Andrews is on his way home when
confronted by a drunk driver who is swerving and careening all over
the road (while “Jingle Bells” blares loudly over Andrews' car
radio.) Finally, there's a smash-up and Andrews is injured and tossed
from the car, with aforementioned presents carefully and artfully
strewn about.
He is now felled with a horrendous back
injury that will require months of recovery and loads of money for
medical bills. (No mention is ever made of the apparent head injury
that necessitated a big smear of theatrical blood in the prior photo,
though he does eventually show some signs of mental duress!)
The presiding physician breaks the news
to Crain, Mock and Byron and one is so distracted during the scene
it's hard to concentrate on the diagnosis. You see, Doc (Stuart
Nisbet) has so much back hair that it's crawling up and out of the
neckline of his scrubs! What is the point of sterilized gloves and
clothing if a hair hedge is creeping out, ready to fall into the
patient's wounds at any given moment?!
After careful deliberation, it is
decided that, since Andrews will no longer be able to drive his
extensive sales route and the family is close to being broke, the
ONLY answer is for them to sell everything and drive from Boston to
the deserts of California (!) where Andrews' brother has arranged for
him to buy and manage a roadside motel and cafe! (Because we all know
there is no physical labor at all involved in the running of a desert
motel....!) Mock is horrified at the thought of leaving Boston,
though the others get on board with it.
Crain's reaction to Mock's disapproval
of the relocation gives us yet another look at the hyper-crazy
expressions that Ms. Crain has settled on as her personal signature
for this movie. One can't really blame her. It's a colorless,
insignificant role that she has been handed, so she must have decided
to step up and stretch her near-dormant acting muscles. And after
all, Beatrice Straight basically stole this basic look and color
scheme (and maybe even some of the faces!) in Network (1976) for
eight minutes and took home an Oscar!
Now we're off on the road to the Dailey
Motel, which Crain at the wheel and Andrews, white-knuckled, in the
passenger seat. The ever-present kids are hanging onto the front seat
with running commentary. They are soon beset by a pair of hot wheeled
vehicles drag racing on the open road, with little to no regard for
the benign, square-looking Plymouth Belvedere that Andrews' family is
riding in.
The kids carelessly run Crain off the
road, whereupon she decides to just park there, in the middle of
nowhere, so that the kids can get out and play and Andrews can get
his doctor-prescribed exercise! Mock finds a tree to lean against
while Byron and Andrews toss a football back and forth. Then the
reckless teens are back and the girl (Mimsy Farmer) tosses a
ginormous unopened can of beer at the family!
An outraged Andrews refers to the kids
as animals, pronouncing it in a bizarre way that still has viewers
scratching their heads lo these nearly fifty years later! The
“animals” (Paul Bertoya, Farmer and Gene Kirkwood) pull off the
road to a semi-secluded spot. Farmer has been tearing up and down the
highway repeatedly with her hair pressed flat by the wind, yet when
the car pulls over, her hair is suddenly a thick, full bouffant!
Two of the teens (Bertoya and Famer)
decide to get busy together, so Kirkwood is sent packing, on foot
(!), to a local gas station!
Sadly, this scene is the only one with
any beefcake potential at all and even then it is just Bertoya's back
and a side view of his chest. It's made rather clear, though, that
despite the lack of skin, he and Farmer have gone all the way.
Andrews, Crain and the kids are once
again on the road, but hit another hurdle when one of the tires blows
out and the car goes swerving around as Crain freaks out. It occurs
to me as I continue to chortle over the way everything concerning the
car is handled that this was before power steering was a standard
feature and perhaps it was indeed more difficult to command a vehicle
than we may be used to now.
As you can see below, Andrews is not about to
let Crain get a corner on all the zany expressions. He gives her a
run for her money on several occasions himself!
The beleaguered family drives on the
rim (!) to a service station, which happens to be the same one young
Kirkwood is hanging out at. While they wait for the old timer who
runs the place to change out the tire with the spare, Andrews engages
in a tete-a-tete with the smart aleck punk. Here we see a shot of
Crain and Mock entering the station to rest up. I dearly love snug
pencil skirts like this, though perhaps they weren't the most comfy
thing for a lengthy car ride!
Anyway, now Andrews has really pissed
off the young rebel-rousers because he not only rubbed Kirkwood the
wrong way, but they know that he is about to own and operate the
motel and bar that they frequent! (It's many miles away, but this
entire movie treats the expansive desert as if it's merely a small
neighborhood!) They want to scare him into retreating back to where
he came from rather than have their little den of iniquity cleaned
up.
So we get more of the hot rods (the
principle trio invite several of their souped-up friends to join in
the “fun”) trying to run the family off the road, box them in,
etc... Of course, all of this is accompanied by inane bits of
dialogue and off-the-chart facial expressions from everyone. As a
side note, chief perpetrator Crain is always chiding other people in
her family for going too far or being overly dramatic!
Finally, after a lengthy segment of
terror, the Andrews' car pulls off of a long, dusty, otherwise
deserted highway and into a heavily wooded picnic grove with a lake
and scads of people, none of who were ever seen anywhere near the
terrified family as they were being chased down like prey!!
While Mock goes off to dip her feet in
the water, we meet a family consisting of blowhard, boozy dad William
Mims, his blowsy wife Hortense Petra and their feathered-hat-wearing
son Peter Oliphant. Mims drives every bit as recklessly as the
juvenile delinquents, but in his case there's a speeding ticket
offered up by a patrolman.
Bertoya, who is constantly at odds with
Farmer, tracks down the family and manages to slither out to the
little deck where Mock is sitting. He accosts her, attempts to make
out with her and is rebuffed, though she can't deny she finds him
oddly appealing.
At long last the family arrives at the
motel, run by slimy-looking, Hawaiian shirt-clad George Ives, and and
it doesn't take long to see that it's a hopping joint with loud cars
and loud music (not to mention loads of horny teens!)
Music at the bar is provided by a combo
led by Mickey Rooney Jr! (That's him in the dark vest. The ceilings
are so low in this place, made worse by visible beams, that the
owners must have been expecting 5'2” Mickey Rooney Sr. and not his
6'1” son!) His decidedly unspectacular tunes include something called "The Chicken Walk."
Holding court at the bar is none other
than curvaceous, colorful Liz Renay, a real-life stripper, showgirl
and gangster's moll, who led one colorful life! And I could not love
her hair or her ruffled blouse any more under any circumstances!
During all this late-night revelry,
Andrews and Crain are fast asleep in their twin beds, but Mock is
writhing around in her bedroom, practically in heat, tearing at her
hair and spreading it out on the pillow like Cathy from Wuthering
Heights (1939)!
She finally opts to get up and change
clothes to join the festivities and see what all is going on. (Though
it isn't readily obvious in this picture, her top and skirt do not go
together AT ALL. The lavender blouse is paired with a black, blue and
pale grey skirt.) She has barely entered the lounge before running
into a catty, annoyed Farmer who tells her off.
This exchange is interrupted by
Bertoya, however, and he gets Mock out onto the dance floor where
they give each other their best sultry looks while swaying to and
fro.
Andrews stirs and finds Mock missing, throwing the family into
turmoil once more. While Bertoya slips the daughter outside for some
forced making out, Andrews has been told by the jealous Farmer about
Mock's presence at the bar. Andrews attacks Bertoya and tells the
present owner Ives that the deal is OFF!
Andrews has hurt his still-injured back
in the scuffle and takes to his bed for a massage as Mock pleads her
case. Crain will have none of it, though, and ultimately whallops
Mock across the face before offering up some stern motherly advice.
Andrews calls his brother, who is still
further away than the motel, telling him that he cannot subject his
family to even a single night at the place and that they are piling
in the car and coming to him. This shot of the wife is THE MOST we
ever see of her face. The wordless performance has to be the most
thankless role imaginable and, in fact, a wig form on a stick with a robe around it, shot
from behind, would have served the same purpose.....
On the way to brother's, the family
comes upon a severe accident with flares burning and debris around.
We see the feathered hat on the tarmac and instantly realize that the
careless drunk from the picnic grove has had a smash-up.
That is small potatoes compared to the
horror of the return of the juvenile delinquents who are, by now,
fired up beyond belief and seem to want to kill Andrews and his clan!
They bear down on the Belvedere, chasing the car off to an abandoned
roadside diner where Andrews believes there may still be a working
phone. While there, Bertoya traps him and threatens to drive him into
the wall with his car.
Somehow a combination of Crain's
screams and little Byron's threats cause the boys to back off, but it
isn't long before they're at it again. Andrews is somehow able to
drive even though the rest of the family claws at him to the point
where it looks as if he's traveling with a flesh-toned octopus in the
car with him! How he chooses to deal with the punks is something
you'll have to discover when you watch this hooty movie.
Hot Rods to Hell is defined by a
strange dynamic because it was released in 1967, yet has the feel of
a 1950s melodrama. The reason for this lies in the fact that it was
inspired by a short story from 1955 called “The Red Car,” which
was purchased by MGM for the basis of a teen crime film (to be called
“52 Miles to Terror.”) The story was published in January of 1956
(in The Saturday Evening Post), but by March of that year, the wheels
had already come off the movie project.
Cut to a decade later and the property
was dusted off (with precious little, if any, updating!) for use as a
made-for-TV movie. The movie was completed (at 92 minutes), but the
producers decided that it was too intense for TV at that time (!?!),
so it was recut with 8 additional minutes and put into movie theaters
the next year instead. (In 1973, the TV-movie Terror on the Beach
pitted a staid Dennis Weaver with his wife Estelle Parsons, daughter
Susan Dey and son Kristopher Tabori, against some hot rod driving
hippies, proving that some ideas just never get old.)
As noted at the beginning, the artwork
for the promotional posters took a few liberties. At no time is
Mock's blouse open as it is in this portrait, nor, as I said, does
anyone – much less Farmer! - wear a leather jacket.
Here is a bigger, better view of the
car from the poster and, as you can see, these to on the right are
not Farmer and Bertoya!
This more accurate poster (later used for the
burn-to-order DVD) is a lot truer to the piece and contains
flattering pencil sketches of Crain and Andrews (even if Andrews
looks a tad Boris Karloff!)
Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain had been
contract players at 20th Century Fox, appearing together
in the Rodgers & Hammerstein original musical State Fair in 1945.
Later, in 1954, they paired up an
independent British adventure film called Duel in the Jungle.
Then in 1961, they were back at Fox for
Madison Avenue, thus Hot Rods was their fourth big screen teaming
(albeit initially intended for the small screen.)
Andrews had become a highly popular
1940s star with movies like
Ball of Fire (1941),
The Ox-Bow Incident
(1943),
Laura (1944) and
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to his
credit. Though still a name, his popularity began to slip in the
1950s, not helped by a significant alcohol dependency. Nevertheless,
he worked up until 1985 (having gotten sober around 1972.) He is
notable here in The Underworld for his work in
Zero Hour (1957),
The Crowded Sky (1960) and
Airport 1975 (1974.) He died in 1992 of
pneumonia and heart failure at age eighty-three.
Crain made her mark in
State Fair,
Leave Her to Heaven (both 1945),
A Letter to Three Wives (1949),
Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and the 1949 racial drama
Pinky, for
which she was Oscar-nominated (losing to Olivia de Havilland in
The
Heiress.) Married once (for nearly sixty years!) and the mother of
seven children, she eventually began to focus more on family than
career and worked on a few European productions. Her last two films
following
Hot Rods were
The Night God Screamed (1971) - and one can
only imagine her being stalked by a Manson-like cult in this rarely
seen flick! - and
Skyjacked (1972.) She passed away from a heart
attack in 2003 at the age of seventy-eight.
There was a sixteen-year age gap
between the often-paired Andrews and Crain.
Mock had a limited screen career. After
some work on TV, she played a Native American in 1965's
War Party
(which would have made her at home in our recent
Indian Corn post!)
The same year as
Hot Rods, she and several castmates also appeared in
the low-budget
Riot on Sunset Strip, which was produced by the same
man. Beyond this, her show biz career was made up of either TV guest
spots or minuscule roles in movies and she eventually turned to real
estate for a living. She's currently seventy.
Farmer also worked in Sunset Strip,
though she enjoyed a far more prolific career than Mock. Busy on TV
and in movies from the early-1960s, she proceeded to a long string of
Italian films, many of them well-regarded thrillers, when she moved
there in the early-'70s. Later she moved to France and enjoyed work
there as well. She is sixty-nine years of age now and has not
appeared on film since 1991.
Bertoya was a Canadian who primarily
worked as a guest on TV series including Mission: Impossible, I Spy,
Mannix and The Mod Squad, though he also appeared briefly in Che!
(1969) and to greater effect in the obscure erotic flick Strawberries
Need Rain (1971.) He died of unknown (to me) causes in 1997 at only
age fifty-nine.
Kirkwood, like several others here,
appeared in Sunset Strip, but apart from that only did a few TV roles
in the 1960s. Interestingly, he next turned to producing, working on
movies like Rocky (1976), New York, New York (1977), Comes a Horseman
(1978) and quite a few others right up to this day. In the mid-1990s,
he returned to acting for a stretch with small parts in movies such
as Guilty By Suspicion (1991), Night and the City (1992) and The Net
(1995), among others. He is sixty-nine today.
Young Byron had been plugging along in
TV and movies since 1963 and, though he may not be readily
identifiable, has been doing so ever since. Apart from roles in
At Long Last Love (1975),
Nickelodeon (1976) and
International Velvet
(1978) and many TV guest spots, he has also worked various stints on
the daytime soap operas
All My Children,
The Young and the Restless,
All My Children,
One Life to Live and
Port Charles. In this he came
by it naturally, for his mother was Anna Lee, a
General Hospital cast
member from 1981 – 2003. He recently turned fifty-nine.
Harry Hickox, as Andrews' brother, was a busy character actor for over twenty years from 1953 on. He appeared in countless small roles in movies and on TV, a notable role coming with 1960's The Music Man as Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman who is playfully distracted from turning in the film's conman by a suddenly seductive Shirley Jones. Though Hickox left the biz in the mid-1970s, he lived until 1994 when he died at age eighty-three.
Rooney Jr. was the first born child to
his world-famous father (by his second wife, a statuesque beauty
queen.) He had the distinction of being selected as one of the
original kids on The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, but was fired after
just a few weeks for behind-the-scenes pranks involving mixing up
paint colors. After pursuing music for many years (with only the
occasional stab at acting) and working in Willie Nelson's band, he
ultimately “got religion” and his own second wife and he entered
into musical ministry. He is, like so many from this film, sixty-nine
today.
The ever-colorful Renay had to serve a
prison term in the mid-'50s for perjuring herself during the trial of
her lover Mickey Cohen. Afterwards, it was no holds barred for the
voluptuous blonde who streaked down Hollywood Boulevard (when a
grandmother!) and authored a few steamy, tell-all books about her
crazy life. Surely one of her career high points was starring in the
deliriously awful Desperate Living (1977) for John Waters. She died
of gastric bleeding in 2007 at the age of eighty with few chances for
splashy self-promotion left unexplored.
We're screeching to a halt for this
post now and hope you had a fun ride!
RUTH WARRICK: "Initially, there was great interest in Arch of Triumph (1948.) It was from an internationally popular Erich Maria Remarque novel...Well, the picture was a complete disaster, a victim of terrible miscasting. Ingrid Bergman was the first one cast-that should have warned people off the bat. Like everyone else then, I admired her as an actress but here she was supposed to be playing this frail, poor little Parisian drifter. This big, blonde, healthy Swedish girl! And in the most glamorous Edith Head gowns! In the opening scene, when she's on the bridge contemplating suicide, and Charles Boyer comes up to her-well, he comes up to about her nose! Then there was a scene in the script where they go to her apartment and was was supposed to carry her up the stairs. At least they realized this would have been totally ridiculous, so it was not filmed...Most of my scenes were with Boyer...Now in Hollywood during those years not that many actors were adept at using props to call attention to themselves. But Boyer was a theater man, too. I remember one scene we had together in the cafe. We rehearsed it; our director Lewis Milestone said, 'Fine, let's shoot it.' When the cameras began to roll, Boyer suddenly pulled out this huge silver cigarette case that had been nowhere in sight during rehearsal. He lit his cigarette, puffed and puffed and blew the smoke all around my face! I laughed! I just laughed! Then I said, 'Now I know what they were talking about.' That calmed him down...There was about a 45-minute episode involving me in the hospital where I was dying with cancer. Arch was shot in 1946 when cancer was like AIDS-no one discussed it. So they felt my whole hospital segment would be a good one to discard (from the then nearly four-hour cut of the film.)"
VINCENT PRICE: "We knew during the filming that The Story of Mankind (1957) was heading downwards; the script was bad to begin with and it worsened with daily changes. I remember one puzzled visitor asking Ronnie Coleman, 'Is this picture based on a book?,' and he replied in that beautiful, soft diction of his, 'Yes. But they are using only the notes on the dust jacket.'"
JEANNE CRAIN: "I may have been in it, but wild horses couldn't drag me to see a movie called Hot Rods to Hell (1967.) As it turned out, most people felt the same way."
