Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

The Gumball Rally Blu-ray Movie Review

Forward!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 7, 2017

The Sixties had The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but the Seventies spawned its own subgenre of demolition derby sagas, many of which were inspired by the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash founded by motorcar journalist Brock Yates. The roster includes Cannonball, The Cannonball Run (I and II) and Smokey and the Bandit (I, II and III), but one of the earliest entries was The Gumball Rally from 1976, which is the latest cult classic on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection.

The setup for The Gumball Rally couldn't be simpler. A successful candy manufacturer, Bannon (Michael Sarazin), has organized an annual coast-to-coast race starting in Manhattan and ending at the Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach, California. There are no speed limits, no catalytic converters and no rules. The event is triggered by the code word "gumball".

Gumball's story and script, credited to director (and former stuntman) Charles Bail and Leon Capetanos (future scrivener of Paul Mazursky classics like Moscow on the Hudson and Moon Over Parador), assembles a diverse array of personalities behind the wheel, of which probably the standout is an incorrigible Italian lothario named Franco, played with gleeful relish by the late Raúl Juliá. A young Gary Busey is also memorable. But the real stars of the picture are the various vehicles, colorfully streaking down highway and lane from state to state, and frequently leaving havoc in their wake. The vintage Rolls Royce driven by Jose (Lázaro Pérez) to impress his upwardly mobile girlfriend Angie (Tricia O'Neil) and the Kawasaki motorcycle bearing Lapchik The Mad Hungarian (Harvey Jason), who never speaks a word, cause the most destruction—but there's a spectacular display that results from an unfortunate encounter between a plumbers' Chevy van and a fireworks factory.

Amateur racing films usually have a villain representing law and order, and it's always some fussbudget who wants to spoil everybody's fun. In Gumball, the hapless guardian of normalcy is an LAPD detective named Roscoe, a sputtering absurdity played by New York stage actor Norman Burton, who has one of those everyman faces that makes him an ideal supporting player. Roscoe has tried to apprehend the gumball racers in prior years, and he's determined to succeed this time around, but Bannon and his fellow enthusiasts are prepared for him, and Roscoe spends the entire film being stymied and humiliated until the very end when, for one brief shining moment, he appears to have triumphed. But the moment is short-lived.

The Gumball Rally Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

From the opening titles, which feature a gumball machine spilling its contents, The Gumball Rally is dominated by its bright shades of red, yellow, blue and green, the brightest of which are displayed by automobiles in the race. The film's cinematographer was Richard C. Glouner, a prolific DP for television, whose biggest challenge was capturing the racing contestants while moving at high speed, without the shortcut of rear projection and long before the advent of CGI. (All of the actors did their own driving.) For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, a newly minted interpositive was scanned at 2K by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging Facility, followed by color-correction and cleanup, yielding an image of startling clarity for a film from this era. Detail is consistently excellent, except in the relatively brief nighttime sequences, where faces, headlights and illuminated dashboards are framed in ghostly isolation by the inky blackness of the empty highway or cast in shadow by the fluorescent lights of a service station. Sharpness is consistently superior (though somewhat diminished during optical dissolves), and the film's grain pattern has been finely and naturally resolved. WAC has mastered Gumball on Blu-ray at its usual high bitrate, just under 35 Mbps.

The Gumball Rally Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Gumball Rally's mono soundtrack has been taken from the original magnetic master, lightly cleaned of any noise, hiss or interference and encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The roar of engines is the track's chief sound effect, and the words spoken by the actors are often drowned in the mix, but this appears to reflect the original source. (It's not as if the dialogue is all that important.) Though forty-one years old, the track has sufficient dynamic range to convey the magnitude of the onscreen destruction while confining events to the cartoonishly unreal dimension where adventures like this play out without causing any of the participants permanent harm. The jolly, energetic score is the work of Dominic Frontiere (The Stunt Man and Color of Night).

The Gumball Rally Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:32), remastered in 1080p. Warner's 2005 DVD of The Gumball Rally was similarly bare.

The Gumball Rally Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In addition to the real "Cannonball" race created by Brock Yates, The Gumball Rally and its ilk also owe a debt to the 1974 smash-up spectacular, Gone in 60 Seconds, the passion project of writer/director/star H.B. Halicki. Halicki's feature is less concentrated and more meandering, but its scenes of the Mustang famously known as "Eleanor" speeding down busy streets, eluding its pursuers and triggering memorable pileups are an obvious influence on the cheerful vehicular mayhem of a film like Gumball. Like Halicki's film, Gumball lacks a recognizable star, but it hardly needs one. The true stars of the picture all have wheels. WAC's Blu-ray treatment is superb and, for fans of the film and genre, highly recommended.