T.o.t.L.O. E1: “Johnny Dark” (1954)

Welcome to the first-ever installment of Drag City Raceway’s Theatre of the Less Obvious, a series of posts where I will illuminate some of the great (and, in some cases, not so great) car and racing-related movies that, for any number of reasons, seem to have fallen into some degree of obscurity. For my first installment, I’m putting the spotlight on an excellent Technicolor flick from my favorite decade in history: Johnny Dark, staring Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie, filmed in 1953 and released by Universal Pictures in the summer of 1954.

With a roster like that, its safe to suppose this film wasn’t obscure when it was released! A full-color movie from this era with 2 A-list Hollywood stars and an excellent supporting cast was clearly a “full-funded” event, and yet for some reason this excellent film seems to have largely been lost in the sands of time. I can remember first reading about it in an episode of Road & Track magazine when I was probably 12 or 13 years old, but I didn’t get to see it until about 15 years ago, when I was finally able to find it online! While there is nothing particularly memorable about the plot-it’s enjoyable but simple-there is a feast for the eyes of any gearhead interested in some of the era’s more obscure sports cars, as this film is filled with them!

Tony Curtis plays the title character, a ambitious young engineer who works for a fictitious Detroit firm called Fielding Motors. Johnny wants to build a sports car, but the company’s staid CEO states unequivocally that they build “sensible cars for sensible people.” Dark and his friend Duke Benson (Don Taylor) find a sympathetic ear in the head of the engineering department, Will H. “Scotty” Scott  (IMHO the best character in the film, superbly played by Paul Kelly), who allows them a long enough leash to begin to develop their dream car “on the side.” A young new designer named Liz soon joins their fledgling team to create the car’s body and interior, and as she and Johnny begin to make romantic overtures toward each other, we learn that Liz’s last name is Fielding, as she is the niece of the company’s head!

They get as far as getting a prototype, which they call the “X-150,” on the test track and then on an airfield racing circuit, where the first time out it holds its own against a field of Jaguars, Ferraris, and numerous other beautiful period sports cars, until it retires with brake failure. In spite of all the promise the car shows, the CEO is having none of it, and shuts the project down. Sounds like working for GM in the mid 60’s! Thing is, it seems everyone at the company but the CEO is rooting for the team and their car and want to see it succeed, which means plenty of people are willing to look the other way when the team sneaks the car off the company campus under dark of night, repaints it from black to bright red, gives it the alias of the “Idaho Special,” and under that name, enters it into a cross country race running along the west coast from Canada to Mexico. And here is where the action-and the car spotting-really begin!

So like I said, the plot is serviceable but nothing special; what is special are the rare examples of a particular type of car that itself seems have been forgotten: American made small-volume fiberglass-bodied sports cars. For a very brief period of time between roughly 1949 and 1955, this type of car enjoyed an enormous amount of public interest. Sports cars were hot in America and Canada in the early 50’s, but they were expensive and difficult to obtain; almost all of them came from Europe where manufacturers could not build enough cars to meet demand, leading to frustratingly long wait times for enthusiastic buyers, who often could not get the colors, options, or equipment they really wanted. The Chevy Corvette and the Kaiser Darrin were the newest darlings of road, but even those were lower-volume items that could be tough for the average man to get his hands on.

To meet this pent-up demand, a cottage industry started cropping up all over the country of people designing and building their own sports cars, giving birth to the concept of “the kit car.” In fact, British enthusiasts had been building their own cars in their garages since the 20’s, but many of these American enthusiasts turned into entrepreneurs and either partnered with bigger companies to build their bodies in volume, or with firms that could build completely assembled cars. These creations sometimes were bodies mounted on available frames, but in many cases the designers created and built their own frames, and sourced drivelines, brakes, and suspensions from readily available cars of the day (not surprisingly, the Ford flathead V8 was the most popular engine of choice, but those who were better heeled often powered their cars with Oldsmobile Rocket or Cadillac OHV V8s, or even early Chrysler Hemi’s). In some cases only a handful of these cars were built, but others managed to start real factories and turn out a fair number of cars in these wild days. The star car in Johnny Dark is one of the more commercially successful of these cars: the Fielding X-150 aka “Idaho Special” is actually a Woodill Wildfire.

There are a good half a dozen creations like this in this film. Only the Lancer appears as itself; the others are featured with “screen names”: the “Flying Arrow” is a Glasspar G2; the “Thunderbird” (3 years before Ford used the name) is a Victress S1-A, a beautiful roadster body with a combination of Ford and Studebaker mechs. Each of these cars has its own fascinating story which make for an amazing history lesson! Perhaps the wildest of the cottage industry fiberglass cars featured in the film’s climatic race is the “Tomahawk,” the screen name given to the Grantham Stardust, an elaborate creation that looks a bit like a big Kaiser Darrin from the side and rear and-to my eye, at least-like one of the Pegaso Z102’s bodied by Saouchik from the front. This marvelous creation, of which only 12 were built and only 4 are known to survive (including the last one built, which was the one used in this movie), rode on a shortened Ford sedan chassis and was powered by Ford mechanicals, but despite its passenger car underpinnings, had the look of an exotic.

There are also appearances by aluminum and steel classics as well, such as the Kurtis Kraft 500, and famous hand-made one-offs the Bohman Special and the Tatum Special, historic cars which have survived to this day. All of these cars, which appear in the film’s long and exciting final racing sequence, were of American origin.

Remember that this was just a few short years before the launch of the great V8 horsepower race, when sports cars were expected to be powered by lightweight engines, following the European design philosophy of achieving performance by agility and design excellence rather than by raw power. The Woodill Wildfire, primarily sold as a kit with a production run of around 250 bodies of which only 15 were sold as completed cars, was powered by a Willys inline-6. While not a powerhouse of an engine, it was small and light for its day and it was durable, and in a small lightweight car with a fiberglass body it had plenty of performance on tap. This film may be the only place you can see one in high-speed action! The Willys connection, incidentally, is established in the movie’s opening scene, when Johnny and Duke are on the company test track in a pair of Fielding sedans which are actually Willys Aero sedans, with a little modification done to the grille and trim to disguise them.

What makes this movie so cool is that it is a snapshot of an amazing time in history when it seemed like almost anything was possible; a time when Americans had a rare and fleeting combination of affluence, security, and freedom that allowed the call of the open road to be met by anyone, in any way they chose: if a man wanted to design and build and then market his own car, who was to say him nay? We can only wonder what that kind of freedom felt like today, so this film is worth watching for a variety of reasons; a good cast, a fun script, a field of rare cars, and that feeling of the excitement of the road, a cultural touchstone which has, tragically, been snuffed.

There is plenty of good information on the web about this movie and its star cars which is worth a look, such as this piece from Silodrome, another blog I enjoy, or this piece from our friends at Hagarty. And for a really in-depth look at the historical importance of this movie, this is excellent read! But if you want to see these cars in action, zap some popcorn and get together with your own crew of motor heads and check it out, because a high quality upload of the whole movie is available online for free!

And if you’re interested in a shorter focus on the cars, here’s a great video for that purpose, made by a group of enthusiasts who are out to track down, restore, and save these rare American fiberglass cars:

ENJOY, RACE FANS!