A Brief History of Racing at the Movies

The racetrack is an arena defined by noise and movement. At least, it looks that way on the surface. On the set of F1: The Movie, Brad Pitt discovered a different side of the sport altogether.

“There’s a sense of calm in these cars,” Pitt told a red carpet journalist this past week on his way into the F1 premiere at Radio City Music Hall. “When you’re really hitting it, there’s a sublime feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else.”

That meditative experience plays a key role in the climax to F1, which finds Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski delivering another spectacular big-screen ride that does justice to the rich history of racecar movies, and explains why they’ve held such appeal throughout film history.

As Sonny Hayes, an over-the-hill F1 racer who gets back into the game for the first time in 30 years, Pitt embodies the kind of obsessive spirit that compels drivers to throw themselves into track time and again, as if it’s the only place where their world makes sense. The best racecar movies inhabit that mentality. There’s a reason why Warner Bros. and Apple, the studios behind F1, installed an entire IMAX screen in Radio City for one night only: The appeal of the racecar genre requires an audience to sit inside the spectacle and experience the euphoria within.

This is not the first attempt to adapt the unique thrills of Formula 1 racing into blockbuster terms. That would be 1966’s Grand Prix, one of the early efforts to establish the cinematic appeal of fast cars zipping around the track in an endless cycle of speed. In the late 1990s, Sylvester Stallone explored the potential of a new Formula 1 movie, which later became the CART movie Driver. The racecar genre, though, has much lengthier and storied history.

Racing gave rise to memorable movies from the earliest days of the medium, with 1929’s Speedway capping off the silent era and Kirk Douglas’ romantic drama The Racers establishing the genre as a vehicle for alienated men compelled to the race track to escape their troubles on the outside. The 1960s delivered the car fetish phenomenon of the previous decade with slick crowdpleasers such as The Italian Job, while 1966’s breathless Grand Prix teed up Steve McQueen’s more artful and abstract Le Mans.

For my money, though, the highlight of this era comes in the aftermath of 1960s swagger. New American Cinema junkies can’t do much better than Two-Lane Blacktop, the 1971 iconoclastic look at a group of outcasts (musicians James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird) who discover freedom on the road. Directed by Monte Hellman, this 1971 cult classic follows two enigmatic street racers as they zip across the American Southwest in a souped-up '55 Chevy, engaging in a simmering showdown with a boastful driver in a GTO.

With its existential themes, stripped-down dialogue, and stark visual aesthetic, Two-Lane Blacktop epitomizes a generation wrestling with the dueling impulses of rebellion and burnout. Commissioned to capitalize on the success of Easy Rider, Hellman transcended the assignment and delivered a thrilling exploration of the desire to escape the boundaries of contemporary society.

The modern racing movie would arrive 20 years later with Days of Thunder. Tom Cruise began the 90s with a hint of the maturity he would find in the decade ahead of him, playing an upstart racer recruited by Robert Duvall’s Chevrolet tycoon. As Cruise’s character faces down a rival driver played by Cary Elwes, the pair find themselves both stuck at the hospital, where a tentative truce begins to take root. (It also enables Cruise to forge a romance with a supportive doctor played by Nicole Kidman, in her first U.S. performance.)

Equally funny and tense as it explores the fraternal bonds of the racing ecosystem, Days of Thunder benefits from a shrewd and effective script by the great Robert Towne (Chinatown), who balances the racing scenes with the infectious energy of the drivers.

There’s no better way to pregame F1 than Days of Thunder as both movies revolve around unlikely racecar drivers who blossom into speed demons as the thrill of the track gives them wings. The world may change, but the loop of the track doesn’t, and it’s no surprise that generations of movies have probed the metaphorical implications of that for all its worth.

"Fast Cars Forever!" opens with Two-Lane Blacktop on Friday, June 20. For showtimes and other information, go here.