Have you noticed how many Volvos are in movies these days? Try counting them, or looking for the first appearance of a Volvo in a movie with a contemporary setting. The "Volvo Count" or "First Volvo Appearance" is an unflawed way to judge or describe a movie. (Now, this is what's called drawing a long bow! - Editor) Who will ever forget the obvious double-entendre of the villainess driving a yellow 245 in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, the 740 wagon in the background of the last touching bookshop scene in Notting Hill, or the naive-but-classy air lent to the young female lead by the dark-brown 240 in Ten Things I Hate About You?
Well, maybe not ... but I bet, if you have even a mild interest in cars and movies, that you do remember that Simon Templar drives a Volvo; and that James Bond used to drive an Aston Martin, then a Lotus, and now tools around in a BMW. I certainly associate Tom Cruise with NASCAR, Steve McQueen with Mustang muscle-cars, and poor ol' Michael Caine gets mentally connected with Minis ...
You can go back and find quite a few movies with cars or car chases upholding a major part of the action. Car chase sequence started in movies long before sound did (even if you don't know the names of any films, it's easy to remember snippets of a black-and-white non-talkie with Model T's bumbling around after each other), and there are quite a few movies featuring cars, or with famous car scenes, that are worth having a look at purely for automotive interest.
To remind myself of the car movies out there I had a quick squiz around the Web, with a secondary objective of finding out which films others had liked as a result of the movie being about cars. Actually, there aren't too many movies about cars that are particularly good; Herbie Goes Bananas isn't exactly riveting entertainment, and while Christine can hold your interest for a while (purely because its title role is a possessed man-eating red 60's Cadillac convertible), I've not actually managed to sit through to the end. No, most of the better car movies use cars as props, albeit in a major way.
The one that first comes to mind is the most recent that I've seen - Ronin. This has got some pretty awesome car chases in it, involving cars such as an Audi S8 (their 250kW all-wheel-drive range-topper) and a BMW M5, as well as quite a few other European models - Citroen Xantia, Peugeot 406, and an old Mercedes 6.9 beast being virtually used as a battering-ram. It's been available on video for a few months now, but if you've got a friend with a DVD and digital surround system ...
And then there are the classics. I know almost everyone knows about Bullitt and The Italian Job, but they really must be mentioned when you're talking on this topic! Bullitt itself is a fairly slow 60's American cop movie starring Steve McQueen, but it does have one classic car-chase scene with McQueen (who did his own driving) hammering a Mustang while the baddies get away in a MOPAR (Charger?) of some description. I know that both the Mustang fans and the Chrysler fans will be horrified that I don't really know which model cars they are ... but it's a classic scene, and something worth sitting through the rest of the movie for.
The other movie, The Italian Job starring Michael Caine, is actually in my opinion a pretty fun thing to watch in itself; but the best part is the end which involves three very British (one white, one blue, one red) Cooper S's making their escape from the local Alfa-driving police through, around and over the buildings of Turin.
Mad Max is a worthy mention, and not a bad film either, if you can get past the relative amateurism. Unfortunately, it's a little easy to tell that they were only allowed to use a couple-of-kilometre-long stretch of Australian country road to make it, and the film looks a little too speeded-up at times, but it's not too bad overall. It was certainly "fresher" than the two sequels that followed, which moved a long way away from the "car thing" (and I've seen bits of the North American release of Mad Max II, or The Road Warrior as it was called over there, with the American dubbing ... maybe something to avoid), although the second two were somewhat more polished.
Another car chase worthy of mention is the end of The Blues Brothers, another movie that's pretty fun to watch by itself. I haven't got the exact figures here, but to make the movie they destroyed a number of police cars that's somewhere in the mid hundreds ... you've seen accidents in movies with car chases, but this is the ultimate parody of them.
There are a few that I've either not looked hard enough to find, or have continually missed when they get on TV, that others have recommended as worth a look. A very early Spielberg movie, Duel, is centred around a businessman who's hounded by a faceless truck that is apparently intent on killing him. (A truck that's apparently very sick - it blows a lot of diesel smoke all of the time! - Editor.) Vanishing Point is about an ex race-driver who leads police in a movie-length car chase in a Dodge Challenger. Running On Empty is an Australian film about street racing; although I was told the more recent Metal Skin was similar, it really didn't have much of interest to a car buff like me in it.
And then there are always a few lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon "flicks", which if you're unlucky you might have to hire, although they're likely to appear on TV in that time-slot anyway. Cannonball Run and its sequel are about a race across the USA, so obviously it has a few decent bits of car footage - although somehow junk like late 70's or early 80's Mustangs can keep up with Italian thoroughbreds! Gumball Rally is similar, although I don't recall it being as amusing. Smokey And The Bandit is another in a similar vein, again more concentrating on comedy but with enough automotive action to keep you awake (if you aren't too tired, of course). Days Of Thunder is a more slickly produced film about NASCAR in the tradition of other 80's big-star action movies, and again isn't too difficult to watch (mmm, Nicole ...). And lastly, in a big fall from Wall Street which couldn't have been too long before this tripe was made, Charlie Sheen stars in The Wraith; a film about a driver who is killed by a gang of hick racers and who comes back from the dead in his "turbo" (which was actually a Detroit Motor Show concept car not too long before the time the movie was made - I think it was a GM car) ... this movie's a classic to me because it's so bad, with bad editing and script and shadows of the camera truck in most of the chase scenes ...
Yep, cars often add to movies, at least for me. The main thing I remember about The Shadow was that Alec Baldwin's chauffer drives a 1930's pop-up-headlight Cord replica. Even somewhat lame movies can grab some attention through the cars in them. I once made the embarrassing mistake of switching the TV on mid-Saturday-afternoon and my eye was grabbed by some pretty cool looking black Porsche 911's with heavily tinted windows chasing a yellow something-or-other. I stayed with it for a while, with only a few indications that it might be a little bit "Disney", until Frank Spencer started talking ... the Porsches had suckered me into watching Condor Man!
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