Speed

Terry Martin (James Stewart) test drives prototype cars for Emery Motors in Detroit. Jane Mitchell (Wendy Barrie) is the new hire at the publicity department. Frank Lawson (Weldon Heyburn) is the head engineer and designer. Josephine Sanderson (Una Merkel) is the office manager. There is friction between mechanic Terry and the engineering department. Terry has made a new carburetor. With Frank's alterations, they test it in the Indianapolis 500.

This starts with a nice car stunt and then it turns into a ten minute industrial educational film. They need to show off the machinery. I like my heavy metal and this is fascinating for me. For other people, it's probably rather boring. There is a nice little love triangle and then a quadrangle. For sure, Jimmy Stewart is the cat's meow and the audience knows it. It's an early lead role for him. He is certain to get a girl. The car action has some good stock-footage crashes. This seems to be a movie written by the auto industry. I like Jimmy and I like cars. The movie is ok.

... because when he joined the Army air corps and left Hollywood behind, shortly after having won the Best Actor Oscar and the year after having starred in two classics ("Shop Around the Corner" and "The Philadelphia Story"), he had to look back on the earlier part of his career and remember films like this one, realizing that he might go right back to such dismal roles if he returned to acting. After all, Ronald Reagan hit it big with "King's Row" in 1942, but his military service in WWII set his career back aways, maybe permanently.

Terry Martin (James Stewart) is a test driver for the fictitious Emery Automotive Company (a real auto company like GM or Ford would have sued for being named in this turkey), where he becomes romantically interested in in PR person Jane Mitchell (Wendy Barrie). But romantic and professional misunderstandings keep the two apart. Meanwhile, Martin is designing a new carburetor without an engineering degree so he isn't bothered by pesky things such as advanced mathematics or physics. Oh, and MGM decides that Una Merkel, always such a spritely comic presence, is best put to use by playing...a rather stern auto executive??? The auto company decides to put Martin's carburetor to the test by putting it in a car and entering it in the Indianapolis 500, thus producing an opportunity for some very pedestrian and boring back projection and stock footage.

The dialogue is lackluster, the comic parts aren't funny , and the dramatic parts are boring. And who does the film turn to for comic effect? - Ted Healy! The guy who did The Three Stooges the best favor ever by cutting them loose. He's not funny now and I doubt that he was funny then, but then MGM was never known for its comedy chops.

The one interesting thing about it? Early on there are a few minutes of actual footage of how automobiles were made in 1936. But then they could have stuck that in a newsreel and not wasted an hour of everyone's time.

Speed (1936)

This movie has a small bit of historic interest for reasons that don't make it a very good movie. First of all this is James Stewart's first official leading role. As he commented once, he got lots of small parts in big movies, and in this on he got a big part in a small movie. The movie is small because it's low budget and rather poorly written (both in its plot and its dialog).

Secondly, there are scenes of early (1935) Indy 500 racing. The most surprising part of this is having two people in each car, a driver and a mechanic who kept the systems going at their peak (or just keep them going at all in some cases). This allows for some pretty corny scenes where one of the people in one car will make faces or gestures to someone in another car (as they are cruising at 140 mph).

If you like Stewart you'll like him here despite the various limitations. He plays Terry Martin, whose love of racing at a track leads eventually to his going after a land speed record in a bizarre car with a giant fin for stabilization. (This was a special vehicle supplied by Chrysler for the shoot, not quite the real deal.) Of course this leads to a crisis and then the woman of the story, played with lackluster but reasonable ease by Una Merkel, gets her chance to win the hero's heart. This gives nothing away, believe me. It's all in lights from the get go.

A better movie, if still not even slightly brilliant, is certainly the 1950 Clark Cable movie with Barbara Stanwyck in the leading female role (and with a far more empowering part for a woman) , "To Please a Lady." And if you really want to round this out, the Paul Newman movie from 1969 called "Winning" is another faltering attempt at making this scene work on screen. Maybe if all three were played simultaneously on three screens you could get the roar and some interesting plots mixing together well. Individually they make for some fun moments and lots of stalling and pits stops. The actors, at least, are stars that hold their own in each case.

"Speed" is never slow, but that's not the same thing as getting any kind of checkered flag. Watch as filler.

This film was made well before Jimmy Stewart was a real headliner. And, the studios didn't yet know exactly what sort of caliber actor they had on their hands. So, they experimented with him in a variety of films--some successful, some not. This one falls in the middle and while isn't playing the sort of character you'd expect from Stewart, he isn't nearly so out of his element as he would be just a short time later in BORN TO DANCE--where he sings!!! This film is very very reminiscent of a Jimmy Cagney film from just a few years before, THE CROWD ROARS. Both are in fact pretty indistinguishable. Yes the plots differ, but they all just seem like a lot of race cars spinning around track that are obviously the result of rear projection and stunt men. Not both but not particularly good either.

That honor goes to Next Time We Love with Margaret Sullavan. Indeed, she specifically chose Stewart to play opposite her. What stands out here is how even in his early raw period, his naturalness before the camera stands out.

Most everyone's style of acting is rather dated, but not Stewart's. This is so even in the musical he did with Eleanor Powell, Born to Dance. Not even in those early roles where he was honing his skills. He even stands out against Powell and Loy and Company in After the Thin Man, where he shows an early surprising edge. Speed demonstrates that Stewart did drunk well--see The Philadelphia Story for later confirmation of this.

He's also quite sexy in some of that early stuff.