Descending Hawks

Red Line 7000. Among cinemaddicts abroad, Howard Hawks, 69, enjoys a reputation for directorial brilliance based on such classics as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and To Have and Have Not (1944). At home, Hawks's recent work (Hatari!; Man's Favorite Sport?) seems geared to earn profit without honor. So does Red Line 7000.

The plot, characteristically Hawksian, tells of the rough-and-ready guys who race stock cars and their turned-on track followers who cry, cheer and deliver romantic ultimatums that any dewy-eyed dropout might treasure. Scene after scene, brand names--Ford, Omega, Honda, Revell, Firestone, Grey-Rock brake linings--are dragged in like spare parts, as if to guarantee the authenticity of all that happens between location shots of screeching wheels and fiery crashes. "That was a close one . . . oh-oh, there's another one!" cries the agitated track announcer, valiantly promoting the idea that death lurks at every curve, as advertised, whenever a tachometer needle reaches the redline mark for danger.

After the races, there are indoor sports at a Holiday Inn motel, played by a cast of hopefuls whose faces radiate the glossy anonymity of people in television commercials. Confusion is compounded by the fact that nearly every actor resembles someone else. James Caan, as a jealous driving champion, idles along in the Beatty-Newman-Brando tradition. Marianna Hill plays the Leslie Caron part, a French waif passed along to Caan by his track rival James Ward, who is a ringer for Doug McClure, who looks like Troy Donahue. Both on the track and in the sack, Red Line 7000 stresses the importance of luck--which must be the only hope for a movie put together with so little skill.

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