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Synopsis: Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnson is a top fuel drag racer and he's in a fix. The experimental dragster he's been tinkering with has just blown up from under him and he no longer has a car to race. The representative of the oil company that finances his racing team is unwilling to shell out the money to repair or replace the car. This is Phil Adamson, who is corrupt. He doesn't care whether Johnson and his team win races, so long as they place the Fast Co. trademark in front of fans for as little money as possible, but he cares enough about Johnson's reputation on the racing circuit to use it to get kickbacks from tracks who book Johnson's appearance. To keep Johnson on the track, Adamson bucks him down to the team's funny car, which is the baby of up and coming driver Billy Brooker. Johnson is reluctant, since it's a machine he's not familiar with, but he's a team player. This infuriates Brooker, who sees his career in jeopardy, but he's a team player, too. Johnson tells him that it's only temporary until they get the fuel dragster back. When Johnson finds out that Adamson has cancelled the work order to get the dragster repaired, Johnson realizes that he's being screwed and fights back. He begins to badmouth his sponsors in interviews and Adamson uses this as a pretext to fire him and his team. Adamson hires another team of drivers whose mechanics aren't above sabotaging their competitors to win. Johnson, meanwhile retrieves the funny car from a car show with the intent of racing it as an independent and throwing his success back in Adamson's face. The stage is set for a showdown....

Low Culture: There is a tendency among the intellectual arbiters of taste and culture to look down upon "plebian" activities like car racing. This is a sport that traditionally appeals to blue collar audiences and cultural fascists can't abide this. The immense popularity of NASCAR must stick in the craw of people like Roger Ebert or Bill Maher, who have badmouthed the sport in public forums. Regular folks LIKE the sport, though, and, hell, it's kinda fun to go out to the racetrack on a warm summer evening and watch the time trials and listen to the roar of the engines. The point of this is that Fast Company is a "forgotten" or "lost" movie. It barely exists on video and no one talks about it much. Why should they, you might ask? It's a negligible exploitation movie with fast cars, naked women, and explosions. It's drive-in movie fodder. Ah....but it was written and directed by art-house darling, David Cronenberg.

Since even Cronenberg's early horror movies have a ferocious intellectual landscape, one can forgive the guardians of high culture for wanting to forget that this film even exists. I mean, it just doesn't fit in with the rest of Croneberg's body of work. It's a complete abberation, actually.* Fast Company does represent an important turning point in Cronenberg's output, though, since this film assembles the key crewmembers that Cronenberg employs on all of his movies for the first time. It lacks only Howard Shore on the soundtrack.

Drive-In: Make no mistake, Fast Company is a drive-in movie. Like most Canadian movies from this era, it was financed by people looking for a tax shelter, so the production company didn't really care if it was any good, just so long as they could write it off if it tanked (Cronenberg seems to be lampooning this early in the movie when John Saxon's character tells the pit boss that winning doesn't matter). The film is stocked with great B-Movie actors (even though Claudia Jennings's part isn't much more than an extended cameo). It has lots of car racing. It has explosions. It has gratuitous sex (ah...the seventies, when sex was there for the taking on the highway, when a pair of hitchhikers in Daisy Duke cutoffs meant a threesome in the trailer...). In terms of iconography, this isn't terribly far removed from Truck Stop Women or The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (two other exploitation classics starring the late Ms. Jennings). Anyone who approaches the film looking for David Cronenberg's subtextual hallmarks will search for them in vain. Some of the elements of the film ARE interesting, though. If the film were made today, or if it had been made by Corman's New World Pictures during the seventies, the hero of the film would be pretty boy Nicholas Campbell, who's character is the sort of post-adolescent loose cannon that Jerry Bruckheimer likes to feature as the centerpiece of his movies. Cronenberg's hero is B-movie badass William Smith, who wears his years like scars. Smith, a terrific character actors, lends his lead performance a measure of gravity that his younger co-star would not be able to manage. Cronenberg talks about how he wanted a female driver to appear in the film--anticipating Bonnie Bedelia in Heart Like a Wheel--but he was talked out of it by his producers. This is a shame, really. While the elements of b-movie exploitation movies have a certain pop vitality to them, Cronenberg obviously chafes at them. These elements are the weakest part of the movie.

A Roar of Engines: Cronenberg obviously likes cars and car racing. He returned to the subject in his perverse and controversial adaptation of J. G. Ballard's Crash**. In that film, he uses cars as stand-ins for his characters' sexual pecadillos and dysfunctions. In Fast Company, Cronenberg is fascinated by cars as objects unto themselves. As a result, we get a ton of the minutiae of drag racing and dragsters. Cronenberg takes his camera on a tour of cars and the machinery inside them. There is a level of detail in this movie that is disproportionate to what the screenplay actually requires. Cronenberg's fascination with cars elevates the material. When cars are prominent on screen, the film is damned good looking and has the feeling of a documentary. Croneberg puts the audience IN the car. During these sequences, I wished I could see the film in surround sound on a big screen.

The remainder of the movie is well-filmed--obviously the work of a seasoned crew of professionals--but it is anonymous. At no point can the viewer point to the screen and say "That's a Cronenbergian shot." Absent are the post-modern spaces in which Cronenberg places his stories. Absent, too, are the chatty intellectuals with weird names. In their place, we get a picture of the racing circuit as it existed in the 1970s. This is pretty accurate, too, if unflamboyant. The film IS populated with creepy passages of silence, usually at the end run of drag races. These are as close to Cronenberg's usual aesthetic as the film really gets. One wonders what this film might look like if Cronenberg were to remake it with better actors, a bigger budget, and a better band providing the rock and roll score. There are cinematic touches here that resemble Scorsese, actually, and if the resources were there, I'm willing to bet that Cronenberg could have made this into a minor classic.

Unfortunately, the resources WEREN'T there and Cronenberg is stuck with the actors he has, so this ISN'T a minor classic. Mind you, for who they are and what they are given to do, the actors are very good. All of them, William Smith and John Saxon in particular, trade on their status as B-movie icons. But this isn't really providing characters so much as it is providing personae. The music, anthemic seventies arena rock performed by a band WAY down the list of session performers is really bad (one wonders, given the presence of Rush in Canada, why Cronenberg didn't seek THEM out, instead--although it is entirely possible that he couldn't have afforded them in the first place...).

The print of the movie I watched seems to be a dupe that is a couple of generations down the line, which harms the film immeasurably. This may very well be the only way ANYONE will ever see this movie, which means that it is unlikely that anyone will be able to judge the film on its own merits. Pity.

(Edit in 2006: Blue Underground's DVD for this film is imacculate, as usual for them. This DVD makes the last paragraph here obsolete).

*Well...not a complete aberration. It's worth keeping in mind that Cronenberg's first four horror films were aimed at the drive-in market. It's also worth noting that Cronenberg's first "art-house" movie, arguably Videodrome, had the working title of "Network of Blood." Back

**There is one exception to this: There is a scene in Fast Company that explores the erotic possibilities of motor oil. This predates Crash by 18 years, but would be right at home in that universe. Back