"All the bubbles are gone", Laura Devon observes at one point; and Howard Hawks should really have quit when he was ahead with 'Rio Bravo', since his sixties films are a pretty sorry bunch.
Structurally and thematically 'Red Line 7000' bears many similarities to 'Only Angels Have Wings', but stock car racing hardly merits the heroic status it's accorded here, a bland young cast mouth banalities like "That's all you really care about, winning"; and James Caan and Marianna Hill are not - to put it mildly - Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.
The actual racing sequences are obviously intercut with studio shots of the ladies watching from the crowd, and there are some shockingly obvious soundstage exteriors.
This long, glossy, but disjointed production (which looks suspiciously as if a lot was left on the cutting room floor; but not enough) ends very abruptly; perhaps the most true to life feature of it.
Structurally and thematically 'Red Line 7000' bears many similarities to 'Only Angels Have Wings', but stock car racing hardly merits the heroic status it's accorded here, a bland young cast mouth banalities like "That's all you really care about, winning"; and James Caan and Marianna Hill are not - to put it mildly - Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.
The actual racing sequences are obviously intercut with studio shots of the ladies watching from the crowd, and there are some shockingly obvious soundstage exteriors.
This long, glossy, but disjointed production (which looks suspiciously as if a lot was left on the cutting room floor; but not enough) ends very abruptly; perhaps the most true to life feature of it.