The Gumball Rally

THE GUMBALL RALLY

Warner Home Video, $14.97

"Gumball." That one word sets in motion a cross-country race that serves no purpose whatsoever other than the 90 minutes of fun that is The Gumball Rally. An escapist romp from 1976, it's determined to have a good time, and what's wrong with that? Constant car crashes, sex jokes, and outrunning inept cops. Ten-four, good buddy.

Director Chuck Bail, one of the top Hollywood stuntmen of the day, sold the film idea with a newspaper clipping about a real New York-to-California race. The result is a retooling of the madcap car-chase caper made perfect in 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but this time with gearheads in mind. A rich candy maker, portrayed by Peter Fonda look-alike Michael Sarrazin, gets the gum ball rolling and calls into action an odd mishmash of racers: elderly English gentlemen, bored housewives, a harmonica-blowing redneck (Gary Busey), and – for comic relief only, since this is a car movie, dammit – a crazed idiot on a motorcycle. The late Raul Julia is a revelation as an Italian racer brought in as a ringer but more interested in wooing the ladies. The script is earnest, the camera work crisp, and the levity heavenly.

Sarrazin, after all, resembles Fonda like Gumball resembles Easy Rider; like the protest-marching Sixties resemble the aimless, post-Watergate Seventies. Which is to say in a funhouse mirror way that would eventually yield punk. A silly film about a pointless race is punk? Totally. Picture this: Gas prices are going through the roof, hippie idealism is dead, and a 55 mph speed limit is slowing down everyone's groove. The only escape is the open road, a few laughs with pals, and the constant rev of an engine too powerful for its own good. The soundtrack of The Gumball Rally is that purring, spitting, snarling motor daring us to break the law for the sake of anarchy.

Five years later, Burt Reynolds starred in The Cannonball Run, a better-known version of the same cross-country race that gave us desperate, shrill, in-jokey laughs that crumble with the test of time. Gumball's honesty helps it endure. Julia's race driver says it all when he tears off his car's rearview mirror and says, "What's-a behind me is not important." Now that's punk.

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