Overview: Hollywood legend Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo) floors the accelerator in Red Line 7000, a late career treat that gave James Caan (The Godfather, Rollerball) his first starring role and would later be an influence on Quentin Tarantino.

Overnight fame, overnight fortune, and any-night girls, the men of Banjo Baker’s racing team press ‘em all to the limit in this story of three ambitious young drivers trying to make their names in the thrilling world of stock-car racing. It’s a dangerous life for the drivers and the women who love them. In the red zone beyond 7000 RPM the engine might blow, but it’s the only way to win.

Shot by Milton R. Krasner (All About Eve) with a screenplay by George Kirgo (Spinout) and a supporting cast that includes Charlene Holt (El Dorado), Marianna Hill (High Plains Drifter), and a pre-Star Trek George Takei, Red Line 7000 features pulse-pounding scenes of real life racing and crashes that will take your breath away.

Blu-ray Verdict: One of the strangest race car movies of all time is also the most grounded, deliberately mundane, and yet directed by an old Howard Hawks starring a young James Caan, it’s worth both watching and re-watching since there’s so much going on! (albeit barely on the racetrack!)

Caan is one of several racers holed up at a Holiday Inn and partaking in various affairs while driving for Norman Aldan, whose tomboy sister Laura Devon winds up quickly bedded with the film’s buried lead in muscular John Robert Crawford, whose rushed backstory of a farm boy wanting to be the fastest takes away from an against-the-odds story that should have been Caan’s role (in my humble opinion).

Instead he’s the most contented and dependable of the drivers, and often seems bored despite his natural screen presence, eventually winding up in the arms of his future brother’s trophy wife, Marianna Hill from THE GODFATHER 2, a spurned foreign beauty who, like the other relationships mixed and matched throughout this sport genre melodrama, consists of mismatched couples bickering till they bang!

But what makes RED LINE 7000 shine despite the lack of plot and action is its colorful 1960’s template, looking more 1967 than 1965, a two-fold time-piece showcasing that era’s womanizing yet equally vulnerable playboy types and their reluctant-till-their-not dames. Also including Gail Hire as a widowed co-owner of the kind of groovy nightclub that’s neat to hang around in within this mellow hangout vehicle, the film may sound tedious but it is far from that and fully deserves another viewing via this beautiful new Blu-ray presentation from Arrow Films. [F.M.]

BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS:
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
Original lossless mono audio
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Audio commentary by Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman
Bruce Kessler: Man in Motion, a new interview with assistant director Bruce Kessler
Gas, Gears, Girls, Guys & Death, a new visual essay on the film by filmmaker and critic Howard S. Berger
A Modern Type of Woman, a new visual essay on the “Hawksian Woman” in Red Line 7000 by film scholar Kat Ellinger
Image gallery of posters, lobby cards, and stills
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Hadley
Double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Hadley
Illustrated collector’s booklet containing new writing by film critic Martyn Conterio

www.arrowfilms.com