Drive in ‘76: ‘The Gumball Rally,’ ‘Shadow of the Hawk,’ ‘From Noon Till Three,’ ‘The Great Texas Dynamite Chase’

Each month, from April through September, Drive-In ’76 revisits the drive-in fare of fifty years past, from big Hollywood releases to low-budget exploitation movies that played in the wee hours of the night. It’s August. We’ve got four movies lined up. Sit back and enjoy the shows.

Feature One: The Gumball Rally (released August 20, 1976)

“The ultimate in simple-minded movies is a thing called The Gumball Rally,” Tony Mastroianni claimed in his review for The Cleveland Press. He meant it as a warning rather than a recommendation. He continued, “The idea seems to be that if you can do something oddball with a speeding, crashing auto that is both funny and exciting then a whole movie of speeding, crashing cars will be a certain action-packed comedy hit.” And, sure, while Mastroianni goes on to describe the movie as “tedious,” chances are that the film’s ideal viewers, based on that description, will have already been making plans to check out The Gumball Rally, in which a group of diehard motor enthusiasts race each other from Manhattan to Long Beach in a variety of tricked-out vehicles seemingly designed to ignore speed limits and most other traffic laws.

Then again they might have thought they’d already seen the movie. In 1975, a Time magazine article brought national attention to the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an irregularly held, unsanctioned, rule-free, anything-goes cross-country race created by Car and Driver’s Brock Yates and Steve Smith. The interest inspired Yates to begin work on a screenplay for a film about the event, but he underestimated the speed at which the B-movie industry would swoop in and beat him to it. New World’s Paul Bartel-directed, David Carradine-starring Cannonball arrived in July, barely beating The Gumball Rally to theaters. But, The Gumball Rally itself demonstrates, winning doesn’t matter as much as having a good time, and The Gumball Rally is undeniably that (or at least undeniably that for those who want a lighthearted film filled with speeding, crashing autos).