6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
It's fast, funny, outrageously illegal. Put your pedal to the metal for The Gumball Rally. New York City is the starting point and this supersonic contest ends 2,900 miles later in Los Angeles.
Starring: Michael Sarrazin, Norman Burton, Gary Busey, Susan Flannery, Steven KeatsComedy | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
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.
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'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 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.
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.
1975
Warner Archive Collection
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Warner Archive Collection
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