The Illegal Race Through America.

I had a beautiful 104 minutes the other day which I would like to tell you about, if you’ll spare me a moment.  A moment, you’ll be pleased to hear, briefer than the one required to read my last couple of posts.  Anyway, the five-score-and-four minutes in question were spent watching 1976 car chase caper The Gumball Rally, the movie of the race of the same name.  It’s a pretty cool film by the way, but the real beauty came, as it so often does, from the stirring up of childhood memories.

If you are able, now is the time to replicate the effect of travelling back into one’s memory banks.  Maybe squint a bit, maybe play a little harp.

When I was a particularly wee nipper, probably around 7 or 8, I watched a film with my older brother, and carried from it two vague but enduring memories.  One is of a car breaking cleanly in half as it crashes through roadworks, the other is my brother telling me the name of the film is ‘The Illegal Race Through America’.  Race?  America?  Illegal?  My young imagination was captured.  A few years ago, I decided to track the film down.

By the way I do realize you already know where this tale is headed, but I shall soldier on regardless, for I feel a need to get this out.  Sharing experiences y’know?  Planting seeds.

My long search for ‘The Illegal Race Through America’ took me on a pretty cool ride as, one by one, I ploughed through every American car chase film it could conceivably have been (I realized early on that my brother had been mistaken on the title).  Thus, I got to flavour the delights of Grand Theft Auto, Cannonball! and Gone in Sixty Seconds.  The flip side of the coin was of course The Cannonball Run which, while certainly no Smokey and The Bandit 3, is a pretty wretched sack of swill, oozing with slapstick characters, sped-up driving scenes and a severely past-his-best Burt Reynolds.  In short, it’s a homeless man’s Gumball Rally.  I watched each of these films and more, hoping beyond hope to see a car fall clean in two during a decidedly unlawful race across the Land of the Free, but ended up disappointed every time.  Particularly the time I watched The Cannonball Run. 

And then I tracked down The Gumball Rally.  And I watched it.  And I shuffled forward on my seat as a car approached some roadworks, and let me tell you friends, that car broke clean in two.  And this race was illegal, not to mention through America!  I sat and I smiled.  I had found the film.  Not to mention become somewhat of a connoisseur of American car chase films.