A film that should well have been lamentable and yet which defies expectations, The Car triangulates trends in mid-1970s pop cinema, taking advantage of the success of Jaws (1975) with its lurking monster thrills, the wave of post-The Exorcist (1973) American horror films charged with a fashionable fear of Satanic influence, and the open-road chase movie exemplified by most anything starring Burt Reynolds.
Kicking off with a quotation from Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey (“Oh great brothers of the night who rideth upon the hot winds of hell, who dwelleth in the Devil’s lair; move and appear”), The Carpresents the unlikely concept of a seemingly demonic vehicle marauding in the vicinity of a small Utah town. The car’s first victims are a pair of happy young folk on bicycles trundling along a mountain road. Soon after, a young French horn-tooting hitchhiker is similarly targeted after flipping it the bird. Local law enforcers Sheriff Everett (John Marley, perhaps the least likely Utah lawman imaginable) and his deputy Wade Parent (James Brolin) are alerted to the mysterious and deadly force at loose in the area.
The only witness to one of the deaths is a man Everett despises, Amos (R.G. Armstrong), who married Everett’s long-ago love Bertha (former Visconti and Welles actress Doris Dowling) but has become an abusive creep. Soon Everett himself falls victim to the car, leaving Wade to lead resistance with the motley remnant of the local police force, including Navajo officer Denson (Eddie Little Sky) and recovering alcoholic Luke (Ronny Cox). The car targets school kids rehearsing a marching band parade under the tutelage of Wade’s schoolteacher girlfriend Lauren (Kathleen Lloyd, who had held her own against Nicholson and Brando a year before The Missouri Breaks). The teachers and their charges manage to take refuge in a cemetery where the car seems unable to follow them, leading Lauren to abuse and defy the killer machine. But she pays the price for her moxie when the car seems to deliberately track and target her, eventually launching an assault on her house.
The Car is certainly absurd, but it’s very likeable in its absurdity. It’s not as offbeat and evocative as John Carpenter’s take on Stephen King’s Christine (1983), which managed to splice together retro Americana and the nutty yet potent image of a murderous, self-animating car to become a perverse valentine to consumerist creation as fetish object and lifestyle enabler. But The Car was very well-produced on Universal’s dime, and delivered with a breezy energy and brevity that prevents anything getting drawn-out and sillier than necessary. Director Elliot Silverstein had made Cat Ballou (1965) and A Man Called Horse(1970). This kind of classy schlock seems a jarring detour from the flip burlesque of the first film and the sturdy adventure telling of the second, but The Car sports aspects of both approaches, offering a sense of humour welling from its characters, but playing the plot straight. Silverstein and DP Gerald Hirschfeld do admirable work manipulating the space and light of their setting for menace and atmosphere.
Silverstein’s feel for the western landscape is strong, and he gets the most out of the location with the raw and ragged rock forms fit for Old Testament contests and vertiginous roads winding through mountain tunnels and over grandly arching, defiant bridges, human arts splitting the vistas and crossing chasms, but with the depths of hell coughing up new challenges in the perfect form to exploit such arrogant impositions. First suggesting the malice of the title vehicle in giant close-ups of its rolling tyres as it advances out of the fringes of the civilised world and stalks young victims, Silverstein thereafter exploits his widescreen frames expertly, having the car appear as a tiny dark blur or glint of light amidst the sprawling dust-plains and rocky outcrops, or, most indelibly, as a pair of relentlessly growing headlights glimpsed through Lauren’s window as it charges her home.
The 1970s were a golden age for regionally-made and set US horror films, some of them made with a sense of authenticity that overcame awkward productions to achieve a lasting impression, from a rock-steady classic like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to crude but interesting oeuvres like Charles B. Pierce’s backwoods bloodletters and others. The Car seems ripe to exploit a vibrant strain of American Gothic similar to what King was making his name writing at the time. Indeed, The Car is surprisingly close to the basic template of King’s early writing, with an eruption of apparently random chaos delivered by a mysteriously sentient object in a small town, whilst establishing the locals in terms of their septic psyches, closet griefs, and everyday negotiations of life.
These range from Luke’s booze problem, which reactivates as he loses friends to the car, to the old love triangle between Everett, Amos, and Bertha that’s long since become a tragedy played out in averted gazes under black eyes, and Lauren wondering how to get Wade’s two daughters to accept her in the family. But the mood is closer to the cheery, open tenor of a ‘50s monster movie, with dashes of new-age drollery, apparent in Wade’s kids listening in on him and Lauren with giggly, dirty-minded fascination. Brolin, surely the human equivalent of the wood panelling that was so popular in the decade – slim, cheap, attractively lumber-like – plays the kind of cool dad who carts his girls to school on the back of his motorcycle. Silverstein’s history with quippy, sturdy heroines from Cat Ballou is apparent here too as Lauren provides a node of good-cheer, leading her young charges in a jazzed-up take on Sousa and grabbing her boyfriend by the balls whilst putting on a Bogart voice just for the hell of it.
The Car never quite makes as much of the American Gothic potential as it might, though. In spite of the setting and the apparent infernal nature of the car, neither script nor visuals show any interest in studying the locale with a sense of specificity, beyond noting a few Navajo folk. The town conspicuously lacks any ranting preacher men or sense of the schismatic mindset of one of the US’s most uniquely religious states in a permissive era, to lend resonance to this Manichaean battle, which could either exemplify or subvert such moralistic associations.
The car’s project is less to bring fire and brimstone down upon the town’s iniquitous, like a chrome-plated take on High Plains Drifter (1973), or become evil idol, than enact the usual checklist of slasher movie villains: hunt down anyone who’s getting some ass or showing it some sass. It doesn’t get as wild and delightfully free-form as the same year’s The Manitoueither, although it similarly conjures malevolent spirituality erupting out of the heartland. Armstrong’s presence calls to mind Jack Starrett’s Race With the Devil (1974) which generated an eerier mood in surveying an American landscape infested with devils even as it degenerated into a cardboard action film.
The closest The Car comes to sketching such dimensions is the sequence in the cemetery, as the car bashes furiously on the gates of the frontier graveyard with its dusty old pioneer tombstones, the genocide express frustrated by the persistence of a mode of faith and sense of history sunk into the red earth. Leonard Rosenman’s creepy score helps, drawing on the same themes from Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” Stanley Kubrick would later use in The Shining (1981) to imbue his opening driving scenes with a similar sense of freewheeling down the road to meet grim fate.
The Car, like many a ‘70s horror film, has no problem throwing likeable characters under the murderous juggernaut’s wheels. Silverstein builds tension thanks to such narrative instability and the arbitrary gamesmanship of the car’s appearances, particularly sly in a late scene when Wade realises the car has parked itself calmly and quietly in his own garage: Silverstein repeats a shot of Wade moving through the garage with the car in the shadows of the second survey, so obvious it’s hard to notice, a piece of cheeky directorial sleight-of-hand worthy of the following year’s Halloween.
Ron Underwood’s beloved Tremors (1990) notably borrowed several aspects from this, including the desert setting and the bait-the-charge cliff-top climax. The car itself is a creation of memorable artisanal menace. A rebuilt Lincoln Continental (apt; as Tony Joe White’s “They Caught the Devil and Put Him in Jail in Eudora, Arkansas” had noted, that make of car was already the stuff of Faustian reward), the eponymous vehicle suggests at once a bullying tycoon’s road terror and a hearse, with its raised body and cropped, low-profile roof, a paint job glossy and black as Elvis’s hair, and silver bull bar made for bone-shattering. A blaring truck horn announces cruel intent as the car cruises like a black torpedo amidst swirls of dust.
The finale is particularly well-staged and especially ridiculous, thanks to the sight of the devil-car trying to catch Wade like a bull trying to pen a matador. The hitherto mediocre men of the town manage to band together and combat the threat, luring it into an explosive trap that sees the car blown to pieces and disgorging the suggestive sight of a clawed hand and snaking tongue amidst whirling fire. The sun rises and all seems right with the world again – a tremendous shot from Hirschfeld – but then another car is glimpsed cruising the roads of a big city under the closing credits. Sufficient unto the day is the evil sedan thereof.