by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” Charles and I watched last night was one I had
recently downloaded from archive.org and the person who uploaded it had decided
to shorten it by leaving off the credits, so it wasn’t until I looked it up
after we watched it that I knew anything about it other than its title, The
Racing Strain. The imdb.com site listed two
films by that title, one from 1918 about horse racing and this one, from 1932,
about auto racing. It was a Willis Kent production, based on a story by Dorothy
Davenport — billed as “Mrs. Wallace Reid,” widow of the major silent star who in
1923 achieved the unfortunate distinction of becoming the first (but hardly the
last!) Hollywood movie star to die a drug-related death. (Like such later stars
as Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi and Edith Piaf, Reid had become addicted to
opiates after he was prescribed them medically — in his case as painkillers
following injuries he sustained making the 1919 film The Valley of
the Giants, later remade with Kirk Douglas
as The Big Trees — and he died of
flu in a sanitarium while he was trying to kick his habit.) His widow teamed up
with producer Willis Kent to make a film called The Road to Ruin, originally filmed as a silent in 1928 and then
remade as a talkie in 1934 (it’s better by far than the other anti-drug movies
of the period — Reefer Madness, Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell,
Assassin of Youth, Cocaine Fiends, Narcotic
— but it’s still a cheap, seedy exploitation movie), but she worked on other
movies with Kent as well and this one was a vehicle not only for her but her
son, Wallace Reid, Jr., who played the male lead. The film opens at an
Indianapolis 500 race in the early 1920’s —though the cars we see in the race
are early-1930’s production convertibles that wouldn’t have existed in the
early 1920’s and wouldn’t have raced at Indianapolis when they did exist — in which race driver Jack Westcott (Lorin
Raker) has a fatal crash. Like an opera character, he doesn’t die at once but
manages to linger long enough to tell fellow driver King Kelly (Paul Fix) to
take care of his son Bill (Dickie Moore) — the boy’s mother Rose left Jack
years earlier and he hasn’t heard from her since, so his dying wish is that his
son be raised by someone he loves and trusts.
The film flashes forward 10 years
and Bill is now a teenager played by Wallace Reid, Jr. He and King are driving
across the country in a raggedy-looking old Model T Ford which seems to be
missing its fenders, and there isn’t a clue as to how they’re supporting
themselves, but it’s quickly established that King was a star racing driver
until he was indefinitely suspended from the sport for driving a race while
drunk. While he and Bill, whom he calls “Big Shot” — a name his dad gave him literally with his dying breath — are driving across the desert
they meet a young society woman, Marian Martin (the appealing Phyllis
Barrington), and her surprisingly butch Aunt Judy (Ethel Wales) — we even see
her in pants — in a fancy car that’s stopped running. Both King and Bill have a
look at its engine before they realize that it’s out of gas, and they offer to
tow it to the nearest gas station, though King insists on sitting in the big
car with Marian and Bill ends up in the same seat as Togo (Otto Yamaoka), the
Martins’ chauffeur, whom they run across inside a tree where he’s been chased
by a cow he thinks is a bull. (The other characters immediately recognize the
beast as a cow, and director Jerome Storm gets close enough to her udders that we do, too.) Needless to say, a romance develops
between King and Marian, and she tells him of a mysterious “friend of my
mother” who, she suggests, has enough pull with the racing authorities to get
King’s suspension lifted as long as he agrees to remain sober. (It’s not
surprising given Dorothy Davenport’s background that substance abuse, addiction
and recovery feature prominently in her plot!) The mysterious “friend” turns
out to be her father (J. Farrell MacDonald), who owns an auto company and not
only gets King’s suspension lifted but gets him a ride for the first big race
of the new season at Ascot near Los Angeles (which, according to an imdb.com
reviewer, was a real-life track that eventually closed because so many fatal
accidents took place there). Needless to say, “Speed” Hall (Eddie Phillips),
who won the racing championship after King was ruled off, becomes his rival not
only on the racetrack but for Marian’s affections as well, and “Speed” is being
backed by two sinister promoters who have bet heavily on the upcoming race and
can’t risk King being able to drive in it, so they determine to sabotage him
somehow. “Speed” is against this — he wants to beat King fair and square — but
they meet and, without “Speed”'s knowledge, hatch a plot to get King out of the big
race.
Meanwhile, there’s been another plot line in which Bill has developed
into a capable driver but doesn’t want to race because he can’t get rid of the
memories of his father’s death — so the “racing strain” in his blood has
manifested itself in another way: he’s hooked up with a couple of promoters in
the area who own a plane and sell rides as a carnival attraction. He begs them
for chances to take up their plane and shows off his skill as a superb stunt
pilot — the point is he isn’t willing to race cars but can do aerobatics because his father didn’t die in a
plane crash and therefore isn’t traumatized by flying the way he is by driving
— and the two plot lines converge at the end when we learn the plot the
promoters has hatched to keep King out of the big race: they send him a letter
from Bill’s mother Rose, or at least a woman purporting to be Bill’s mother Rose (both the American
Film Institute Catalog and imdb.com list
the character as “Tia Juana Lil,” played by Mae Busch, but it’s not at all
clear from the actual movie whether she’s an impostor or the real Rose Westcott
fallen to lushdom in a Tijuana bar), demanding that she get back her kid. King
decides that he has just enough time to drive to Tijuana, settle with Rose (or
Lil, or whatever her name is) and
get back to drive in his race, but when he gets there “Rose” insists that she
join him for a drink before she negotiates her payoff. The drink is drugged,
and King loses consciousness. Bill and Marian find the note King got and Bill
realizes the only way they have to rescue King in time is to fly, so he borrows
his friends’ plane again, lands it three miles outside Tijuana (on an otherwise
deserted strip of desert where a Mexican cabdriver just happens to be parked), and they set off to rescue King from
the baddies, which Bill accomplishes with ju-jitsu moves Togo taught him. So
now the suspense is whether they can get King back to the track in time and how
the writers (Betty Burbridge and producer Kent, working from Davenport’s story)
will resolve it — will King recover from the knockout drug in time to race or
will Bill take over and drive his car to victory? Eventually Bill wins the
race, overcomes his fear demons, but sneaks out of the car with no one the
wiser and everyone at the track (including King himself, once he recovers)
convinced that King drove the winning race.
The Racing Strain isn’t much of a movie but it’s quite good for the
budget and the time: the script is quite well done, expertly constructed and
building emotional identification with the characters instead of observing them
from above, like lab rats, as all too many modern movies do; director Storm’s
work is technically excellent and, though the racing sequences must have been
liberally filled out with stock footage, the joins are surprisingly convincing
and enough racing scenes were specifically staged for the film (probably at the
real Ascot raceway) that we believe these people are actually driving an auto
race, with all the risks attendant thereto. As for Wallace Reid, Jr., he has an
almost unearthly beauty and he’s a good enough actor it’s surprising he worked
only sporadically — just 10 films in all over 11 years, ending with an
uncredited role as a pilot in a 1943 war movie called Bomber’s Moon (imdb.com lists 12 acting credits for him, but the
first two were as children in his dad’s movies in the early 1920’s).
The Racing Strain is the sort of film that
deploys the expected clichés but does so in a fresh and surprising way, and as
I noted above there’s real suspense over which of the two obvious plot resolutions the writers will
use — and auto racing is intrinsically exciting from a visual standpoint and
it’s surprising more films haven’t been made about it, especially since just
about every article I’ve read on the subject says it’s the world’s most popular
sport (though according to one source I’ve read, if you added all the different
variations of football — rugby, soccer, American and such oddball variations as
Aussie rules — and counted them as one sport, that would be more popular than
auto racing).
