Drive like Hell and you're sure to get there

GRAND THEFT AUTO (1977) may be the closest Ron Howard has ever gotten to pure cinema, that theoretical cinervana in which intense and profound emotions are evoked through the rejection of narrative and character by an abstract amalgamation of light and color and the redoubtable Kuleshov Effect. Certainly, the film has characters - it has a lot of them - and they say stuff and there's a story but none of this matters in the face of the film's high octane forward momentum which points the plot straight at the human tendency toward self-destruction. In a way, GRAND THEFT AUTO is superior to Paul Bartel's fun but overrated DEATHRACE 2000 (1975), which ultimately cares too much that you know how smart it is. GRAND THEFT AUTO is as dumb as choking on your own saliva and its language is universal. You could watch the film with the sound off and not miss anything; by the end, Howard and leading lady Nancy Morgan are the same cornpone naifs they started out as (they're as hairless and sexless as the intergalactic grays who practice their chisenbop with François Truffaut in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) and everyone else in the film huffs and puffs like a Mack Sennett fallguy.

The stunts in GRAND THEFT AUTO are clean and painless; you never worry about the safety of the drivers or the characters and that got me thinking... maybe the crashes and conflagrations that abound in the film seem inconsequential because all of the characters are already dead. Like the clueless clods in the FINAL DESTINATION films maybe they're just racing toward a preordained finish... and in a way that notion is born out in the film: after the big Demolition Derby denouement, most of the supporting cast is trundled out of the frame in handcuffs, screaming in protest as if they were being dragged naked and unprepared before the throne of Judgment. Maybe all Howard needed was that final shot to really sell the message...

... that speed kills.