Original title: Gone in 60 Seconds
Year: 1974
Director: H.B. Halicki
Screenplay: H.B. Halicki
With: H.B. Halicki, Marion Busia, Jerry Daugirda, James McIntyre, George Cole, Ronald Halicki, Markos Kotsikos, Parnelli Jones, Gary Bettenhausen, Jonathan E. Fricke, Hal McClain, J.C. Agajanian, Sak Yamamoto.
Duration: 98 min.
Grade: 6/10
Movie Trailer: When a South American drug lord pays Pace to steal 48 cars for him, all but one is in the bag - thereby, the police precipitate in a desperate car chase against Pace and his Eleanor across Southern California.
SO BAD is GOOD
Another one of my favorite movies. Although, in this case, I don't know if it even qualifies as bad. The performances are abysmal, the script is almost non-existent... and yet, it ends up being entertaining enough for us to watch it more than once, even if we've already seen the much better remake with Nicolas Cage.
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In this version, time is not wasted with superfluous things like a script, dialogues, etc., but rather goes straight to the action. People paid their admission to see vehicles crashing and smashing, not some wannabe actor looking to win an Oscar. If you were expecting Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, this is not your movie.
Because there are no "real" actors in Gone in 60 Seconds (1974). And the same film tells you with brutal honesty: the opening credits do not contain the names of those who appear in front of the cameras, but the car that stars in the final chase.
The poster reads: "Watch 93 cars destroyed in the most spectacular car chase ever filmed!" I don't know if it's the most spectacular, but it is the longest, since it lasts more than 40 minutes, with just a bit of dialogue, between crashes saying things like "ouch!", "oops!", "careful!".
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And that's it. I repeat: we are not going to see great performances since the "actors" are basically extras with dialogue, and I also repeat, we don't have a screenplay, the dialogues are not going to make our brains explode with its complexity. There is, more or less, a story, and in the next few paragraphs I will tell you in case anyone is interested.
There's a guy named Mandrian Pace (Halicki) who's an insurance investigator by day, and by night… I mean, also by day, he's the ringleader of a gang of car thieves. At the beginning we are shown at least one of their various modus operandi: they buy a totaled car in one of the many auctions that the local police does, they steal a car of the same make and model and put the stickers and identifications of the one they bought.
To all this, the astute reader will be thinking: "Hey! I could do that!" Well then, wise reader friend, before you invest your money in a pile of junk, I warn you that this movie is from almost 50 years ago, and precisely because of this movie, car manufacturers began to pay more attention to these little details and today there are not three f***ing stickers, but they record the wheel with a laser beam like Goldfinger, not only the engine block and the windows and the chassis and the crapping, but they give you PIN unlocking, facial recognition and imprint of the big toe of the left foot, so I do not recommend it as a work opportunity. In any case, it would be more advisable to opt for simpler vehicles, such as bicycles. Or turn to crime only within the confines of a video game.
But hey, the thing is that Pace, beyond being a ringleader, is a worker who doesn't give up for going to steal a car or two after lunch, and that's how he puts on a wig and a mustache and he dresses up as Magnum PI to play GTA 20 years early. The guy has a little suitcase with some gadgets that he uses to force the lock and gut the ignition, and in 60 seconds the car that you left parked while you went to buy candy at the store has disappeared, not even David Copperfield does that.
And a strange guy throws Pace a few dollars and asks him to take over fifty cars, an assortment of the most famous brands. Magnum and his friends go back and forth and collect all but one, a Mustang coupe like the one used by 007 in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Pace takes charge of the theft, but his brother-in-law, who had it in for him, rats him out to the police and that is how we have the aforementioned chase that lasts 40 minutes and a fraction.
40 minutes? Yes, and not a minute, or sometimes half a minute, goes by without one car or the other being crashed, overturned, disabled or even torn in two. It's just that Halicki, in his "real" job, was a scrap dealer, owner of a scrapyard. And so it was that the guy bought for little coins not only almost a hundred old pots, but he even went to a local police auction and bought several patrol cars on the verge of obsolescence, which are the ones we see happily destroyed in the final minutes of Gone in 60 Seconds.
And of course, the star of the film is "Eleanor", the Mustang coupe, which goes, comes, crash, and jumps through the air in such a way that by the end of the film the poor little car is no longer what it was. In a way, Gone in 60 Seconds ends up being a very long commercial for Ford to show the tremendous punishment that the Mustang could take while still operating at the top of its capacity.
I postulate this movie to the newbie as a weekend entertainment, to see it without expecting much. I don't think it justifies the usual condescending comments of those who tend to criticize American cinema per se, although, yes, it is an almost amateur film, the type "we got together with Uncle Charlie and some neighbors and filmed a movie with an iPhone." It turned out too well for poor Halicki, who a few years later would die in an accident on the set of one of his later films, which of course would also involve the destruction of a good deal of junk destined for scrap. Those were other times, without airbags or fuss.
Gone in 60 Seconds, just as you see it, made with punches, has more rhythm than many movies of its time made with a much larger budget. More than one will be surprised at how entertaining this film from almost half a century ago ends up being, with its shoddy "actors" and their dented pots and pans.