I suspect most people think of Susan Sarandon as an intelligent actress who has made all kinds of films, but is generally regarded for her more serious work. So, it is always startling to see some of her early films. It seems her appearance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is largely accepted today. But she was in many other films around the same time which I’m going to guess she would rather forget.
Such a film is 1977’s Checkered Flag or Crash. She is second-billed to Joe Don Baker, which I suspect is the only time they appeared in a picture together. Billed third is a pre-Dallas Larry Hagman. The rest of the cast is a bunch of people I didn’t recognize, nor expect to see in anything in the future. One such actor has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-moment where he yells to Baker, “I’m ruined!” while smiling and waving. That was weird enough that it is going to stick with me for a while.
This sad, and surprisingly dull, film is centered around a 1000-mile off-road race through the wilds of one of the islands of the Philippines. There are cars of various types, motorcycles and even an outlandish taxi bus in the mix of competing vehicles, in what is essentially a no-holds-barred, three-day race. So how could this be so boring?
A huge problem is how the race sequences are shot. At no point did I have any idea where the individual racers were, whether in proximity to each other or in the overall progress of the race. I soon became tired of trying to follow the event, which made it very difficult to focus on the film. It also doesn’t help that a great deal of the action footage is in slow-motion or treated with some sort of irritating effect that seems to skip frames. The latter making the already jerky footage almost impossible to watch.
Compounding the overall frustration is those great many actors fourth-billed and below. It seems almost every racer has at least a small quirk to make them stand out from the others. That would be a nice touch, except that’s all the majority of characters have going for them, so I was confused why we were following so many very minor subplots concerning those people.
The focus should have been overwhelmingly on Baker and Sarandon, except these two have zero chemistry together. I wasn’t even left with the impression there may have been behind-the-scenes animosity between these actors. Instead, there is simply nothing there between them. Each might as well be talking to themselves.
Baker is a hotshot driver and shoe-in to win the race. Really, he is just the same character you have seen in any movie he’s been in. As for myself, I always believe he’s playing a continuation of his role in Mitchell, the subject of one of my favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Sarandon is in the passenger side of his car for most of the race, as she is a journalist covering the event for a magazine that paid for his ride. That doesn’t stop him from cruelly abandoning her by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which isn’t that much different than how he treated Linda Evans in Mitchell, arresting her immediately after having sex with her. In this film, he also drives through a pole that was keeping some poor shlub’s shack from collapsing, for no apparent reason but to be a dick.
Then there’s Hagman as the race promoter and organizer. He is largely confined to his office, receiving radio reports from drivers as well as the helicopter monitoring their progress. All I can say about his performance is he seems hellbent on saying “motorsickles”, which has given me a new pet peeve.
With so little of interest on the screen at most times, the deeply horrible soundtrack draws a disproportionate amount of attention. It is like some sort of amalgamation of music for a high-spirit romp, with a bit of country thrown in, and a dash of that Americana-type schmaltz that was so prevalent in the 70’s. And why is xylophone used so much? The way it is used implies something funny should be happening, though it is usually employed at moments where a racer is horribly wounded, or maybe even killed. There are many racers who appear to be lifeless following a crash and then there’s no follow-up about them, so I assume they were killed.
Still, the soundtrack of Checkered Flag or Crash provides one of the few memorable aspects of the experience, namely the astonishingly bad title track. Performed by Harlan Sanders (who is not KFC’s Colonel Sanders), this is so bad as to crossover into a weird kind of awesome. The closest analogy I can think of is the song in Pod People that is memorably mocked by the MST3K crew, who mishear lines as things like “flying over trout”. How I wish they had done this movie. I wonder what they would have made of the theme song to this picture.
Dir: Alan Gibson
Starring Joe Don Baker, Susan Sarandon, Larry Hagman
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray