Yeah, I know, it’s all a bit ‘adolescent’ and I’m sure there are all sorts of more worthy subjects for me to be writing about this week, but when someone posted something about the movie ‘Shaker Run’ on Facebook last week I just had to go looking for the link on YouTube to watch it again.
I was living in Wellington at the time Shaker Run was being filmed and wandered along early on a Sunday morning to watch the bit where the cars burst out of the Terrace Tunnel and rip through the Willis Street intersection.
You’d need a frame-by-frame examination of the actual film to see if even I could spot myself supposedly using a phone box while the cars flash by but that’s not really the point. Sir Peter Jackson was still working part-time as a sub (editor) on the Dom or Evening Post (can’t remember which it was) at the time so just having a movie being filmed within cooee of my flat was a big deal.
Since then I must have seen literally hundreds of movies with action ‘car chase’ scenes in them, and – as Ken Block, who I recently profiled in a column has proved – the appetite for a little ‘auto-escapism’ is greater than ever.
Incredible as it might seem Block’s ‘best-selling’ Gymkhana video, #5 (filmed in and around San Francisco and which you can watch here, has recently breached the 100 million views mark.
You read that right, not one million, or even 15 to 25 million, but 100 million, not bad for what in effect is an ad for DC Shoes. Even the ‘Making Of’ video has been viewed over 5 million times.
Which got me thinking…….and googling away like a boss to come up with a loose-ish sort of list of my own personal favourites.
Which, thanks to my current passion/interest in drifting has got to start with one of the scenes from Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift.
While I’m tempted to nominate the bit where the Godfather of drift, Keiichi Tsuchiya (who has a cameo role as a fisherman) watches movie lead Sean the ‘Army Brat’ learn the finer art of the sliding game on a Tokyo wharf and mumbles ‘that’s not drifting.’
But I’m not going to because the bit I actually like best is the ‘fantasy’ scene where Neela shows off her own drifting chops in a dramatic downhill team touge run which does what movies do best, (combine fantasy and reality and which you can check out below).
While on the subject of drifting my personal favourite local ‘skid vid’ is this stunner produced by Chris Smith and hosted on his sadly short-lived blog, Freshly Whipped.
It features Cam Vernon drifting up and down the Coromandel hill stage (Highway 25 between Coromandel and Whangapoua) of the 2012 North Island Targa event as part of a Targa 4 Touge promotion.
Mad Mike might have put New Zealand on the global car-culture map with the high production values of his Red Bull-backed YouTube video (6.4 million views and counting) drifting his RX7 up the western side of Queenstown’s Crown Range but give me the raw driving and filming brilliance of Cam ‘n Chris’ 57K views effort every time.
Back to cars in popular films, however. Who, for instance, could forget Roger Donaldson’s classic ‘rural gothic’ take on the dark side of marriage and family life, Smash Palace, and the amazing scene when the hero, Al Shaw, jumps in his single-seater and belts off down the road outside his rural wrecking yard only to flash past a local Traffic cop (when there were such things) in a black-and-white HZ Holden Belmont.
It’s a scene which, I’m sure, had many local drivers, from club right up to national and even, I’d imagine, international level, squirming in their seats as the watched the movie, and something most of us have, if not done, at least seriously contemplated doing, over the years.
I’m going to run out of space here, before I namecheck some of the real classic ‘driving’ or ‘chase scenes’ so before I do let me flick quickly through some of the best known and/or most highly regarded.
For a start there is the scene from the movie Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen and arguably the most famous ‘movie chase car’ of all time, the dark green Ford Mustang of tough San Francisco beat detective Frank Bullitt.
Another personal favourite is Smokey and The Bandit, or rather the car stunts in this Burt Reynolds/Sally Field ‘vehicle’ and which are no doubt the reason I’ve always wanted to own a targa top Pontiac TranZam!
When you’re talking US movies you can’t help but include two very different films (not to mention chases) Duel and the French Connection.
Duel was a young Stephen Spielberg’s first major movie and involves a car and a truck. As simple as that sounds it is one of the scariest things, I think I have ever seen, as the bloke in the car is relentlessly stalked by what appears to be a driverless semi-trailer.
The French Connection has a similar 60’s noir/’70s nihilism vibe with a downtown Brooklyn car chase done in real time with no road closures…………….
I’m probably showing my age here, but I also like the car chase (though compared with today’s efforts it is all rather tame) in the original Italian Job.
The Daddy of them all, of course, has to be the final chase scene in seminal US movie The Blues Brothers. According to one website I consulted in researching this column, more cars were wrecked in the making of The Blues Brothers than any other. And you can believe it too, as cop car after cop car is totalled in an orgy of automotive mayhem.
Of course there must be literally hundreds of other worthy candidates for whiling away the odd winter afternoon on YouTube but I will leave you with just one more; the ‘Wellington’ bit from that other classic Kiwi movie Goodbye Pork Pie.
I was working as a Fitter’s Mate at the Mataura Freezing Works the summer ‘Pork Pie’ was filmed and – before I knew anything about it – wondered what the odd-looking ‘battleship grey’ Holden Belmont ‘Police car’ was doing driving past the (now demolished) sheep chain building one morning.
My interest was further piqued when a stripped-down yellow Mini followed a few minutes later…
Today both cars would be tucked away in a covered semi-trailer ‘between takes’ but back then, whether either was registered or warranted or what, they were obviously driven………
But again, that’s enough from me. If you’ve got a favourite car or car chase scene from a movie, particularly from one I haven’t mentioned here, feel absolutely free to share it and a YouTube link in the comments section below.
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