The Pace That Kills

The Pace That Kills (1928)

** (out of 4)

Country boy Eddie (Owen Gorin) is a great guy. He's a hard worker on his family's farm. He is loved by his mother as well as his sweetheart who he plans to marry. The only problem is that his young sister has ran off to the evil city so Eddie must go there and try to find her. Soon he meets Fannie (Virginia Roye) at his job and she introduces him to some "headache medicine" and before long they're raging addicts.

This here was producer Willis Kent's first film and it's basically a melodrama about the downfall of drug addiction. The producer would follow this film up with a number of low-budget Westerns and in 1935 he'd remake this as THE COCAINE FIENDS. The producer would then fully hit the exploitation market with movies like MAD YOUTH, CONFESSIONS OF A VICE BARON and TOO HOT TO HANDLE. Overtime this film has become known as the first drug exploitation movie but it's not really that.

For the most part this here is a pretty straight drama. Those expecting anything like the remake or the craziness of films like REEFER MADNESS will be disappointed because it's not like that. The drug addiction that is shown in the movie is done so in a more realistic way and the main focus is on the love story between these two people who start to fall further and further into darkness. The first eleven-minutes try way too hard to show what a great guy Eddie is and his "downfall" happens at the flick of an eye.

I actually thought both Goris and Roye were good in their roles. Neither one of them overact and for the most part they're quite believable. I think the film's biggest problem is that it just doesn't come across as a movie from 1928. It really seems to have been influenced by the various D.W. Griffith mortality films from 1909-1913. Still, THE PACE THAT KILLS is an interesting movie and fans of the drug sub-genre should enjoy it.

When you look at the poster for "The Pace That Kills", you can only assume that you're going to see a porno film. After all, a nude woman is on the poster...along with a cocktail glass and a couple making out. However, it turns out that this ISN'T a porno film but a reasonably well made exploitation film...the sort you CAN let your kids see (despite the poster saying it's 'For Adults Only')!

Now I expected the film to be a complete pile of garbage. After all, I saw the 1935 remake and it was awful...earning a paltry score of 2. But it really is not that bad a film...and I was shocked to see it.

The story begins with a young man leaving his country home and going to the big city in order to look for his sister, who moved there and then completely disappeared. He gets a job there and things look good...for about five minutes! Soon, he meets a good-time girl who introduces him to cocaine, drinking and nightclubs! But the thrill of coke is short-lived and soon he's graduated to morphine, opium and heroin! What's next? See the film.

The big complaint about the plot is that the young man's slide into degradation is just too fast. But, the effects of the drugs and where it all leads is not all that unrealistic...something odd about drug films of the era which are usually filled with much more misinformation. Not bad at all....but also not all that good as well!

It's a fairly typical Willis Kent film: innocent farm boy goes to the city and falls prey to them evil slickers and their recreational drugs. This was the year when SUNRISE came out, with much same story, so it was a dependable theme. Kent split his productions between this sort of exploitation film and B westerns well into the 1950s.

It's well handled here and the photography is quite lovely. That's hardly surprising, given that this is the first time that Ernest Laszlo was credited as director of photography. His career would stretch into the 1970s with some great movies to his credit and even here, in a cheaply made feature for small town audiences, his work is excellent.

What is most remarkable about this picture is its sure-handed competence in every department. The biggest name in the cast at the time of production was Florence Turner. In the last year that Hollywood would struggle to save silent movies, minor works like this show how commonplace excellence was.