Red Line 7000 (Hawks, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm
“The most underestimated film of the sixties” Robin Wood
This video presentation, introduced by season curator Karina Longworth, is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Red Line 7000 is also screened on April 26th.
Full details of the season can be found here.
Chicago Reader review:
One of Howard Hawks’s last films (1965), this study of perverse and
insane ambition on the stock car racing circuit did not do well with the
critics of the time, although it has since become something of a cause
celebre. The racing footage, strangely, is flat and dull—so bad that
some writers claim Hawks didn’t direct it. But the dialogue scenes have a
primitive emotional force and directness, in spite of (or perhaps,
because of) the young, untried cast, which includes James Caan.
Depending on your point of view, you’ll find it either beautifully pure
or sadly unshaded. A puzzlement, but intriguing.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the opening.
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