What would happen if a young and talented director with an artistic eye was hired by a production company who were willing to give him a chance, with a mandate to make a movie about a popular form of destructive racing, the “Figure 8,” which had been around a while by the late 60’s but was rapidly gaining popularity in that era?
The producer in question was none other than the (in)famous Roger Corman, who produced hundreds of films from the late 50’s through the late 70’s, many of which are classics, most of which are “cult classics,” but all of which were made on shoestring budgets for minimal investment and maximal profit. The director was Jack Hill, probably best known for his creepy classic Spider Baby, and a director who any Quinten Tarantino fan likely knows of for his now-famous “Blaxploitation” crime films of the 70’s such as Foxy Brown and Coffy. What kind of a film would result when an art-house filmmaker meets a grindhouse producer? We are fortunate to be able to answer that burning question, because Pit Stop is probably the coolest car racing movie you’ve never heard of!
There are some fairly obvious reasons why Pit Stop has spent decades suffering in obscurity. Ask yourself: who was still making black and white movies in 1969? Although it was mostly filmed in 1967, various production issues that often plague low-budget films kept it from being released until 2 years later, and no one was going to drive-in theatres to watch black and white movies during the year of the moon landing! In fact, in nearly every way, Pit Stop appears to be a movie fully 10 years older than it actually is; from its greaser protagonist with a duck-tail haircut to its aesthetic around cars and girls, it codes like a movie made in 1959, with only its bluesy psychedelic soundtrack to mark it as a product of the “swinging sixties.” This makes it super-cool today, but when it was released, it just seemed dated and cheap, and for this reason it received only a very limited release on the west coast and disappeared quietly, not to see the light of day for decades.
But oh, look what they missed! Pit Stop is truly a MUST-SEE event! It is the only movie of its kind ever made, and it has a vibe and a feel so unique that it could probably never be duplicated! Of all the movies I have chosen to profile for Drag City’s Theatre of the Less Obvious, it is my 2nd favorite (only one tops it, a dark comedy dating from 1984, which is currently slated to be Episode 14 of T.o.t.L.O., so stay tuned!) However, it is important to mention that it is a movie that I have a love-hate relationship with, and the reasons for that dichotomy will be made very clear in this post.
It’s also important to mention that Pit Stop is suffering in obscurity no longer: the “hipster crowd” has “discovered” it recently, and it has just been treated to a full restoration with an accompanying Blu-Ray release, and is now available for viewing on several streaming services for the first time ever. Over 2 years ago, I added a link to the full (unrestored) movie which had been posted to YouTube to accompany one of my “Meet The Fleet” posts about the white ’67 Camaro named “Ghost Rider,” which included a cool “art house” video of my own. Not long after I did this, that link went moribund, probably because the copyright holder suddenly decided it was worth something. Indeed it is; this unique film is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and I’m going to attempt to do it justice in my own way, paying homage both to its brilliance, and to its darkness.
All the Love and All the Hate, PART I: All The LOVE
Pit Stop was originally filmed under the title The Winner, which is a much better heading for the movie. Allegedly, the title was changed right before it was released in ’69 due to another movie, called “Winning,” having been released only a few months prior. The reason why “The Winner” is a superior title is because that is what this movie is about: a pair of men who want to win at all costs, no matter what or who has to be destroyed to get them there. This is a car racing movie that is first and foremost a character study. Fortunately, the recent restoration has returned the title card to its original name, although, to find it for viewing, you will need to seek it out under its “released” name.
Rick Bowman is a man driven to win at any cost. Coming out of the fog one night with a ’55 Chevy “gasser” for a street race that goes horribly wrong, he captures the attention of kustom car shop owner and race team manager Grant Willard, who immediately sees his potential as a winner for his own team of racers. Willard bails Bowman out of jail and introduces him to other members of his team and offers him a job. Rick is soon rubbing elbows and fenders with Hawk Sidney, the winningest driver in the Figure 8 series at Ascot Park Raceway, and with Ed MacLeod, a skilled and conservative driver who runs the tuning shop building racing cars for Willard with his wife Ellen. As the film progresses, Rick graduates from the Figure 8 demolition circuit to the super-modifeds to racing custom-built sand rail dragsters in the desert, and finally to the bigger time stock car circuit where MacLeod dominates. While Rick seems to be a man with a heart under his rough exterior, the audience will learn in the end what happens to anyone who comes between him and his ambitions.
The Cast
One of the biggest strengths of this film is its cast; some of Hollywood’s great B-listers star here. Brian Donlevy absolutely oozes cool in his role as the rapacious Grant Willard, the owner of a customization shop who runs a ragtag team of racers on the side. This was Donlevy’s last film before he passed away in 1972, and he played it icy calm. He shows up at an illegal street race in Los Angeles one night driving his chopped kustom Buick Skylark, and is so impressed with Rick Bowman that he springs him from jail and offers him a job on his figure 8 racing team.
Bowman, the movies’ anti-hero, is played by Richard Davalos, ruggedly handsome but rough around the edges and without a trace of “prettiness,” sporting a black pompadour and a brooding attitude. Appearing from out of nowhere one night like a phantom, he is as cool as James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Contrasting with Rick’s icy exterior is the cartoonishly animated Hawk Sidney, played to the hilt by Jack Hill regular Sid Haig, a seriously creepy-looking dude whom many will best know as the heinous “Captain Spaulding” from Rob Zombie’s infamous “Firefly Family” trilogy (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, Three From Hell). He is seen here in his younger years with a full head of hair and without his later trademark long black beard, but those wild eyes and that monstrous toothy grin are unmistakable!
Rounding out the best of the cast are a young and very beautiful Ellen Burstyn (billed as Ellen McRae) as Ellen MacLeod, the wife of Willard’s top driver, who despite her skills being essential to her husband’s success is clearly feeling neglected by him, and takes a shine immediately to Rick when he meets her welding the headers for Ed’s Mustang dragster at Willard’s shop; and the almost child-like tomboy Beverly Washburn as Jolene, initially a groupie of Hawk’s who is also captivated by Rick, and like the others, will learn the awful truth about where Rick Bowman’s values lead. Both Haig and Washburn previously worked with Jack Hill in the 1967 cult classic Spider Baby.
The Film Style
If making a movie about car racing in BW in the late 60’s seems strange to you, well…it seemed strange to the rest of the movie going public, too. But once you start watching it, it becomes clear that, even if using BW was an easy choice due to the limited budget he was working with, Hill made the decision consciously, and made the most of it. The light and the shadow of every scene heightens the intensity of the action and the mood, and gives the whole affair a brooding, subversive feel that could not have been achieved with color. The sequence filmed in the desert is particularly beautiful, but even the drama of the racing crashes seems somehow starker and more severe, as if we are watching a news reel or a medical training film rather than a weekend demolition derby.
There are some conflicting stories about the origin of the movie; in one telling, Hill wanted to make an art film while the producers wanted a movie about Figure 8 racing, and he gave them what they asked for done to his taste. In another telling, it was Hill himself who decided he wanted to make a movie about Figure 8 racing after attending such a race and thinking it was so insane that people were actually doing this that it needed to be documented.
Hill’s knowledge of car racing and car culture may come in for some scrutiny, as there are some scenes in Pit Stop that seem a little ridiculous; for example, Hawk Sidney showing up at the Figure 8 track driving a goofily customized 1958 Dodge 4-door hardtop featuring a flame job and a set of ARE Torque Thrusts (and some strange styling flourishes like 1965 Mustang tail lamp bezels glued to the doors) and going on about his multi-layer pearl flake paint job that “no one had better put so much a ding in”; it’s a FiGURE 8 CAR, fer crissake, we know what’s going to happen to it! This scene may have been made to emphasize Hawk’s instability, but it comes across as ludicrous.
These slips, however, are counter-balanced by some intense and harrowing sequences. The scene in which Hawk runs Rick and Jolene off the road, beats Rick unconscious, and destroys his ’57 Ford Fairlane with a maul while Jolene cowers helplessly alone in the front seat is a textbook example of cinematic cruelty; the whole scene is long and drawn out and very painful to watch. This scene is as brutal as the desert sand rail drags and the bonfire party that follows it are beautiful, and the shop scenes with deep shadows lit by the arc of welders are fantastic mood pieces.
All the Love and All the Hate, PART II: All The HATE
Profligate Destruction: “The Ugly American” on Full Display
Despite my admiration for this movie, there is an element of it that really bothers me, though one for which it is not really fair to criticize the movie or its makers. It is, rather, an uncomfortable element of vintage American culture that I find distasteful and, due to my love for that very culture, am loathe to acknowledge. Yet, watching Pit Stop today will force any viewer to acknowledge it!
Often you will hear me say that watching a movie made in the 60s that shows the demolition of cars from the 40s and 50s has to be seen in context; that this is no different than watching a movie made in 2020 that shows the demolition of cars made in the 1990s. While this is true, there is a matter of degree to take into account: the number of beautiful cars that you will see destroyed in this film is uncountable. It needs to be noted that most of the racing sequences were not staged for the movie; some were, but most were filmed at Ascot Raceway during actual figure 8 races. But that’s the very point: that makes it far worse!
Reflect on this: that every weekend night-and sometimes even on weeknights-at racing tracks all over the country from sea to shining sea, scenes like the ones shown here were repeated again and again and again; that countless hundreds of thousands of Chevrolets, Fords, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Mercurys, Studebakers, Packards, Ramblers, and every other brand of American car from the golden era were wantonly destroyed as entertainment! To make it even worse, most of them were 2-door hardtops and sedans; there are only a few 4-doors and wagons to be seen on the tracks. Watching this amount of destruction is enough to make any gearhead in love with the cars of that era feel absolutely sick! All of those cars are rare and prized today because the ravages of time (read: corrosion) have taken their toll, but long before mother nature did her dirty work, it was the culture itself that was taking away the very beauty it created only a decade earlier. In a way, watching the Figure 8 sequences in this movie is almost like watching Rome burn!
Too Much Prosperity?
As if all the demolition on the racing track weren’t bad enough, add to that the scenes in the junkyards, where magnificent cars that would be worth a fortune today are stacked on top of each other and pushed into the crushers whole, without even being stripped! Grilles, bumpers, lights, door handles, window mouldings, side trim-all left on the cars to be demolished with the rest of it, not a single thought given to preserving anything! All of this showcases a society that had essentially achieved too much prosperity; a time when Americans clearly thought that the party was never going to end, that 18 gauge steel and heavy laminated glass would always be available, that chrome plating would never become a thing of the past, when there was no reason to conserve anything because there was always more to be had!
We know better today, don’t we? Anyone who’s had to suffer the indignity of riding in one of the execrable plastic transportation pods extruded by “the global car corporation” in the years following the “scamdemic” can only make it that much more painful to watch Tri-5 Chevys, Ford Thunderbirds, Pontiac Catalinas and Buick Centurys wasted and thrown away by the countless thousands. The party did end. Maybe if more of our citizens had had a little more foresight, we could have preserved more of the motoring heritage that we were once so blessed to have.
None of this impugns Pit Stop as a film, or the people who made it; but it does have to be discussed, as the film has become a document of the same culture that once had so much and showed such little respect for it. This movie helps make it clear why American cars of the 50’s are so hard to come by today despite millions of them being built.
So, yes: everything has to be taken in context; everything in its day. Yet, In spite of this truth, and in spite of all its strengths, Pit Stop can be a very difficult movie for a gearhead to watch.
The Legacy: The only Art House Racing Movie Ever Made
I am willing to go out on a limb and say that Pit Stop is Jack Hill’s best work. That it isn’t as well-known as some of his earlier and later efforts doesn’t change that. It feels strange watching this “art house cinema” about car races and crashes, and it is this genre-bending combination that gives the movie its power. Although there is certainly some artistic license in some of the scenes of the famous big-budget blockbusters Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and LeMans (Lee Katzin, 1971), Pit Stop is truly in an orbit of its own as the only “art house” racing movie ever made.
It is also an amazing historical document for a variety of reasons: the shop that is shown as Grant Willard’s is actually the shop of famous customizer George Barris, and just to drive that point home, Barris himself has a brief cameo in the picture, playing an employee of Willard’s, shown discussing concept drawings of a custom design with him. The sexy chopped and wildly customized ’67 Skylark Willard drives in the movie’s opening scenes is surely a Barris creation, which makes me want to find out more about that particular car: the story behind it, and what become of it.
The track that most of the racing sequences are filmed at is-or rather was–Ascot Park Raceway in Gardena, CA, which was a hot spot of racing activity and small- and big-screen film activity from 1957 until it was closed and demolished in 1990 (of course it was supposed to be condos, what else? As it turned out, the property, which used to be a landfill, was toxic and was never developed, so the track was closed for essentially no reason).
And as I’ve already hyperventilated about, Pit Stop also provides us with a documentation of the profligate waste of the 60s and 70s and the nauseating volume of mid-century cars that were demolished as they reached the end of their first-run lifespans.
On top of everything else, watching this film today-especially for someone much younger than I am-is a revelation in its depiction of a time when men were men. Yes, I know it’s a cliché, but look at the men in this film: the things they do, the way they relate to each other, the way they prove themselves: all the machismo, all the madness, all the guts and the glory: all elements of a culture that is, quite tragically, as dead and gone as all those beautiful cars.
As the movie reaches its end, the audience is going to get sucker-punched; having taken this journey with Rick Bowman, we’ve come to like him, but in the end, he reveals who he truly is: a man with not an ounce of pity when opportunity knocks. Prepping his ’55 Chevy for his first big race in which is he supposed to support team member Ed MacLeod, Willard gives him license to do more: “Rick, I’ll tell you something I’ve been thinking. I’m a businessman: so as long as a California Custom Car wins this race, I really don’t care very much what the name of the driver is.” This sets up the absolutely heartless finale; by the time the credits roll, the viewer isn’t going to like Rick Bowman any more. But he doesn’t care, as long as he is The Winner.
SO, where can you see it?
As I said right at the outset, Pit Stop was once almost impossible to find but has just recently undergone a renaissance of interest, with a good restoration of the original print now available on Blu-Ray. If you want to stream it, it is currently available on both YouTube here, and on Tubi here, although you will have endure a few commercials on both platforms. Well worth it, I’d say, to see what must surely be the most unusual racing movie ever made, and one which will stay with you long after the credits roll!
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