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Oh, the bulldog on the bank and the bullfrog in the pool
A title like Red Hot Tires (1935) needs no introduction. Either you want to see a movie by that name or you don't. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I did, especially since its first three credited stars on TCM were Lyle Talbot, Mary Astor, and Roscoe Karns. The one-line summary was "A race-car driver wrongly convicted of murder escapes prison to prove his innocence." This turned out to be only about half true, but it doesn't matter: Red Hot Tires is an absolutely delightful B-programmer with lots of snappy dialogue, good footage of championship car racing circa 1934—including some brief but serious stunt driving—and a plot most accurately categorized as a farrago, but that doesn't matter, either, because it's done and out the door in 61 minutes. There seems to be some confusion over whether it was released by First National Pictures or Warner Bros., but it feels like the latter, with its pulpy, rackety energy and its Tardis-like ability to fit a serial's worth of plot developments into the same hour of film. More specifically, despite its release date, it feels like Warner Bros. pre-Code. I happily blame Astor.
She's second-billed, so I'll get to her in a minute. Top billing goes to Talbot as Wally Storm, a hotshot race car mechanic whose cool head with machines and hot luck with ladies provoke such jealousy from driver Bob Griffin (Gavin Gordon, sporting a mustache like a resting sneer) that, not content with getting Wally unjustly fired from his work on the cutting-edge "Sanford Special," he has to pull a Messala at their next meet and get himself killed in the crash that results from sneakily spiking his opponent's wheels at top speed. Because Griffin's confederate Curley Taylor (Bradley Page) presses charges, the accident goes to trial, and because Wally was known to have threatened Griffin—and knocked him down—the trial does not go his way, and because Red Hot Tires has never met a genre it can't immediately zoom out the other side of, next thing you know Wally is breaking out of prison with the help of his sidekick-in-chief Bud Keene (Karns, always a fast-talking treasure) and making a barn-burning career for himself under a false name in South America. Will an invitation to drive a Sanford car in the prestigious Memorial Day Races at Dayton tempt him back to the States? Are his friends still trying to clear his name and his enemies still trying to lock him up? Are there fifteen minutes left to wrap this film up in? Let's talk about Mary Astor.
When I described the character of Pat Sanford tonineweaving, she exclaimed at once, "It's Petrova!" Indeed, Astor would have made an excellent grown-up Petrova Fossil, short dark hair and all. Late in the film, a radio commentator introduces her as "the daughter of the famous racing car designer Martin Sanford and the only woman in the state who holds a racing mechanician's license," but the audience has known from her second scene that Pat's an engineer in her own right. She looks good in grease-stained white coveralls, up to her elbows in an engine of her own design. Her office has a drafting table full of blueprints, automotive concept art on the walls; she reads the latest invoices with a cigarette in her hand. Her rapport with Wally almost certainly stems from their shared interest in machines—Griffin fancies himself a rival for her affections, but since we never see him tinkering around in the garage with her, he hasn't got a chance. She knows about handling cars as well as building them, too; the announcer at the Legion Ascot Speedway may chauvinistically call her "the real prize for winning this preliminary event" as she briefly crowns the winner with the fancily laureled, athlete-ornamented silver helmet that is the trophy of the Indy 500 Dayton 500-Mile Classic, but when Wally fatefully steps in for his driver at the last minute, she and Bud yell technical advice at him from the pits. The second half of the movie goes nowhere without her intervention. In the aftermath of the crash and Wally's conviction, it's Pat who identifies an anomalous bolt in the wreck of the Sanford Special, unscrews it to disclose a highly unsporting tire-spike, and promptly calls a cab over to Curley's place to "perform just a little bit of petty larceny." "You can't do that!" tagalong teenager Johnny (Frankie Darro, last seen pre-Code) protests, like a pint-sized voice of the patriarchy. "You're a girl!" Her response is affectionately delivered, but it makes its point with a grin for his indignation: "That's why I got you, Johnny—you're my bodyguard!" She knows a razor-slashed tire when she sees one. Best of all, when Wally's a no-show in the climactic race, when it's field another driver or forfeit, she collars designated mechanician Bud—"You've got a racing driver's license, haven't you? Well, get in there and do the best you can till Wally comes!"—and climbs in alongside him as his riding mechanic: she's not going to stay out of a car she designed.1 She doesn't get sidelined even when they swap in their eleventh-hour driver. Bud says without hesitation, "She knows more about this car than I do," and helps her back into the inside seat. The happy ending pointedly involves no suggestion that she's about to punt her day job just because of marital bliss. Plus she really does straight-up break into a dude's house and steal a piece of evidence from him. I love everything about her.
I am also fond of Karns' Bud, a dependable but fidgety type who provides the B-plot with a running gag about his never-seen, increasingly unlikely girlfriend Maggie—he's always referring to her, but when pressed for details, the best he can come up with is "She's pretty and her name's Maggie!" Even guys who've known him for half a truck ride are skeptical, but he remains undeterred even after Wally calls him on it in the gentlest possible way, remarking wistfully in an Argentinian club that it "must be nice to have a girl, even if she's only in your imagination."2 His happy ending is a meet-cute straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest. She warns him that he'll be disappointed by her name; he snuggles his head into her shoulder like a contented cat on hearing it. I wish I could say more about Lyle Talbot as the fast-driving hero of this whole affair, but anyone who's going to compete with Roscoe Karns' double-take patter and Mary Astor's sheer awesomeness needs more than good eyebrows and a general air of go-getting nice guy to do it. He's not a hole in the screen, but I'm not sure what he brings to the part of Wally Storm that any other B-star couldn't have supplied; he was so much more interesting as the debatable romantic lead of She Had to Say Yes (1933) that I'm left wondering if he was better in character roles than straight heroes. Testing this hypothesis will give me an extra excuse to check out Three on a Match (1932), Ladies They Talk About (1933), and Mandalay (1934), anyway. He does have good chemistry with Astor. The comfortable way they hang out before the plot really kicks into gear did more to convince me of their romance than all his South American pining. I am probably still more charmed by all five minutes tops of Karns and Mary Treen.
The title of this post comes from Wally's signature song, which against all expectations turns out to provide a significant plot point. I'd say the movie's so short it doesn't have time for extraneous detail, but given the way it ricochets through genres and cliffhangers, that is manifestly untrue. It's a fun little actioner with a surprising streak of not-so-stealth feminism and I'd have written about it sooner if we hadn't had to deal with the Day without Internet and the Night without Electricity. This wild ride brought to you by my handy backers at Patreon.
1. As the latest model of Sanford Special is being pushed to the starting line, Bud says with some wryness, "Hope you ain't jittery, Miss Pat."–"Not any more than you are, Bud," she returns. He pulls a face, jerks a thumb at her side of the car: "That's funny. Wished I was in that seat." She grins at him just as she did at Johnny: "A better man than you is in this seat." Bud takes resigned hold of the wheel and sighs, "Wished a better man than me was in this one!" I understand that particular forking path would have rendered Wally entirely superfluous to the story's climax, but I'd have enjoyed it.
2. The most interesting thing to me about never-seen Maggie is the way Bud uses her not just to stay competitive with his friends' love lives, but as a kind of ventriloquism. In their very first scene together, Bud tells Wally, "That reminds me—I was talking to Maggie and she says you ought to be stepping out on your own hook. You ain't going to get anywhere being a mechanic for Griffin." It's good advice and quite true, but Bud couldn't say it for himself?
derspatchel and I did, especially since its first three credited stars on TCM were Lyle Talbot, Mary Astor, and Roscoe Karns. The one-line summary was "A race-car driver wrongly convicted of murder escapes prison to prove his innocence." This turned out to be only about half true, but it doesn't matter: Red Hot Tires is an absolutely delightful B-programmer with lots of snappy dialogue, good footage of championship car racing circa 1934—including some brief but serious stunt driving—and a plot most accurately categorized as a farrago, but that doesn't matter, either, because it's done and out the door in 61 minutes. There seems to be some confusion over whether it was released by First National Pictures or Warner Bros., but it feels like the latter, with its pulpy, rackety energy and its Tardis-like ability to fit a serial's worth of plot developments into the same hour of film. More specifically, despite its release date, it feels like Warner Bros. pre-Code. I happily blame Astor.She's second-billed, so I'll get to her in a minute. Top billing goes to Talbot as Wally Storm, a hotshot race car mechanic whose cool head with machines and hot luck with ladies provoke such jealousy from driver Bob Griffin (Gavin Gordon, sporting a mustache like a resting sneer) that, not content with getting Wally unjustly fired from his work on the cutting-edge "Sanford Special," he has to pull a Messala at their next meet and get himself killed in the crash that results from sneakily spiking his opponent's wheels at top speed. Because Griffin's confederate Curley Taylor (Bradley Page) presses charges, the accident goes to trial, and because Wally was known to have threatened Griffin—and knocked him down—the trial does not go his way, and because Red Hot Tires has never met a genre it can't immediately zoom out the other side of, next thing you know Wally is breaking out of prison with the help of his sidekick-in-chief Bud Keene (Karns, always a fast-talking treasure) and making a barn-burning career for himself under a false name in South America. Will an invitation to drive a Sanford car in the prestigious Memorial Day Races at Dayton tempt him back to the States? Are his friends still trying to clear his name and his enemies still trying to lock him up? Are there fifteen minutes left to wrap this film up in? Let's talk about Mary Astor.
When I described the character of Pat Sanford to
nineweaving, she exclaimed at once, "It's Petrova!" Indeed, Astor would have made an excellent grown-up Petrova Fossil, short dark hair and all. Late in the film, a radio commentator introduces her as "the daughter of the famous racing car designer Martin Sanford and the only woman in the state who holds a racing mechanician's license," but the audience has known from her second scene that Pat's an engineer in her own right. She looks good in grease-stained white coveralls, up to her elbows in an engine of her own design. Her office has a drafting table full of blueprints, automotive concept art on the walls; she reads the latest invoices with a cigarette in her hand. Her rapport with Wally almost certainly stems from their shared interest in machines—Griffin fancies himself a rival for her affections, but since we never see him tinkering around in the garage with her, he hasn't got a chance. She knows about handling cars as well as building them, too; the announcer at the Legion Ascot Speedway may chauvinistically call her "the real prize for winning this preliminary event" as she briefly crowns the winner with the fancily laureled, athlete-ornamented silver helmet that is the trophy of the I am also fond of Karns' Bud, a dependable but fidgety type who provides the B-plot with a running gag about his never-seen, increasingly unlikely girlfriend Maggie—he's always referring to her, but when pressed for details, the best he can come up with is "She's pretty and her name's Maggie!" Even guys who've known him for half a truck ride are skeptical, but he remains undeterred even after Wally calls him on it in the gentlest possible way, remarking wistfully in an Argentinian club that it "must be nice to have a girl, even if she's only in your imagination."2 His happy ending is a meet-cute straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest. She warns him that he'll be disappointed by her name; he snuggles his head into her shoulder like a contented cat on hearing it. I wish I could say more about Lyle Talbot as the fast-driving hero of this whole affair, but anyone who's going to compete with Roscoe Karns' double-take patter and Mary Astor's sheer awesomeness needs more than good eyebrows and a general air of go-getting nice guy to do it. He's not a hole in the screen, but I'm not sure what he brings to the part of Wally Storm that any other B-star couldn't have supplied; he was so much more interesting as the debatable romantic lead of She Had to Say Yes (1933) that I'm left wondering if he was better in character roles than straight heroes. Testing this hypothesis will give me an extra excuse to check out Three on a Match (1932), Ladies They Talk About (1933), and Mandalay (1934), anyway. He does have good chemistry with Astor. The comfortable way they hang out before the plot really kicks into gear did more to convince me of their romance than all his South American pining. I am probably still more charmed by all five minutes tops of Karns and Mary Treen.
The title of this post comes from Wally's signature song, which against all expectations turns out to provide a significant plot point. I'd say the movie's so short it doesn't have time for extraneous detail, but given the way it ricochets through genres and cliffhangers, that is manifestly untrue. It's a fun little actioner with a surprising streak of not-so-stealth feminism and I'd have written about it sooner if we hadn't had to deal with the Day without Internet and the Night without Electricity. This wild ride brought to you by my handy backers at Patreon.
1. As the latest model of Sanford Special is being pushed to the starting line, Bud says with some wryness, "Hope you ain't jittery, Miss Pat."–"Not any more than you are, Bud," she returns. He pulls a face, jerks a thumb at her side of the car: "That's funny. Wished I was in that seat." She grins at him just as she did at Johnny: "A better man than you is in this seat." Bud takes resigned hold of the wheel and sighs, "Wished a better man than me was in this one!" I understand that particular forking path would have rendered Wally entirely superfluous to the story's climax, but I'd have enjoyed it.
2. The most interesting thing to me about never-seen Maggie is the way Bud uses her not just to stay competitive with his friends' love lives, but as a kind of ventriloquism. In their very first scene together, Bud tells Wally, "That reminds me—I was talking to Maggie and she says you ought to be stepping out on your own hook. You ain't going to get anywhere being a mechanic for Griffin." It's good advice and quite true, but Bud couldn't say it for himself?
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Thank you for contributing!
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Especially with the straight-up breaking into a dude's house. I'm sorry they're in different hemispheres, or I'd ask you to write the fic. Maybe they meet at an international championship?
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Oh, crud, it's not on legitimate DVD. I'm not even sure it's on illegitimate VHS. Well, that doesn't help.
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She is wonderful here; I also like her in Other Men's Women (1931), where she makes the stock character of the woman between two men a person in her own right and interesting, so that the audience really cares about her happiness and not just her husband's or his best friend's; she is, along with the rest of the cast, amazing in Act of Violence (1948). I always forget she plays Raymond Massey's lover in the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda. I'm not sure where else I've seen her. I have the impression her career did a fade during the '40's, which is of course when she would have been entering middle age, Hollywood was crap about older women even then. Oh, right, she's in The Lost Squadron (1932), but I don't feel bad for forgetting; her role could have been played by a reasonably photogenic lamp.
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That's sort of my problem with Falcon -- she was was old enough by then that at the beginning, when Brigid O'Shaughnessy is pretending to be a sheltered socialite, she reminds me of a slightly younger Margaret Dumont; which could have been amazing if they'd run with it, but the script keeps insisting she's a stereotypical femme fatale driving everyone stupid with her raw sex appeal.
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I had never thought to liken her socialite guise to Margaret Dumont; that's a brilliant image. Now I want to see the movie again to see if I agree.
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Re: footnote 2 (It's good advice and quite true, but Bud couldn't say it for himself?), it reminds me of the "asking for a friend" trope, only instead of being skittish about owning up to one's own question, here it's a case of being skittish about owning the advice. Lack of confidence?
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I don't blame feminism! But there are national conversations we have been having all this year that I can't believe we still need to have, yes.
(It is a winner. I wish it were available on DVD!)
here it's a case of being skittish about owning the advice. Lack of confidence?
Bud's better at support than instigation; I'd believe it.