Highway Racer (1977)

Original title: Poliziotti sprint

Palma (Maurizo Merli, confusingly enough without any facial hair) is part of the police unit responsible for all the high-speed chase work the police in Rome apparently get up to. Palma’s a tense macho guy utterly in love with cars (so much so, one would not be surprised to see him having sex with one), as well as with the idea of becoming a big shot cop hero driver like his boss, Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia), was. The problem is that Palma’s all guts and mouth and no technique, crashing cars with wild abandon without getting his men, driving his long-suffering partner and Tagliaferri insane with his bullshit. Add to this how much of an asshole Palma is to everyone, and it’s a bit of a surprise he’s not already tasked with filling out parking tickets instead of endangering the citizens of Rome.

Despite all the man-shouting between them, Tagliaferri does see the potential of a great driver in Palma, as well as something of his own, younger self. So when Tagliaferri’s old arch enemy, the Nicean (Angelo Infanti) reappears as the head of a gang of bank robbers whose claim to infamy is their insane (and actually pretty clever) getaway driving, the old copper decides to take a chance on Palma. He takes the young man under his wing and tries to turn him into the grown-up man he could be, so that Palma can then go undercover with the Nicean and break things up from the inside.

Because this is very much that sort of movie, Palma, already in macho man love with Tagliaferri, will fall equally hard for the man he is bound to betray.

So yes, Stelvio Massi’s Highway Racer (because Rome is full of highways), is very much a prototype for all of those films about men of violence betraying the other man of violence with whom they are in (platonic, because it’s a hetero movie world) violent men love. I wouldn’t be surprised if Katheryn Bigelow had seen this one some time before she made Point Break. And as we all know, the first Fast and the Furious movie is pretty much a remake of that film that replaces surfboards with cars and therefore feels even more inspired by the film at hand, even though it is further removed from it.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean there really has to be any actual direct influence at all, for the story set-up has been done in many a film in-between (and at least partially before), it’s just that the parallels between the second half of this one and the later American films feel particularly striking to me. Especially since the film at hand does quite a bit of what the first F&F movie does with big American muscle cars with small Italian ones, though of course in a late 70s style. These car stunts, even to someone like me who isn’t really into cars, are pretty damn insane, looking dangerous and exciting, and astonishingly real (because, of course, when this was made, they more or less were), crazy and exciting.

Massi shoots the car stunts to the highest effect too, never missing a beat when it comes to make things more dynamic, and at the same time also keeping the audience perfectly informed of what they are actually supposed to see. So there are no cop-out sequences that only go for wheels on the road and hands on the wheel to keep thing together – dynamic clarity is the name of the game.

That’s not the film’s only strength though, for even though its character set-up is of course a bit of a cliché by now, the script by Gino Capone (an Italian genre movie with a single writer credited, honestly) does really understand how to portray its macho characters and their emotional connections, dropping a little jailhouse cupboard philosophy now and then but spending most of its energy in making the guys larger than life in a believable way. I think it actually helps that the film isn’t looking at these men with a raised eyebrow but takes them and their view on life seriously, though never so seriously it isn’t able to call them assholes when it needs to.

The acting’s just as fine, too. Merli seems rather one note here at first, but he actually sells the transition from baby macho (which ironically seems to be what incels think a man should act like) to actual manly man whose macho swagger is so secure he is actually willing and able to admit doubts and weakness very well indeed. His two father/platonic lover (you decide) figures do put the right work in, too. I found myself especially fond of Sbragia’s performance, because of how easily he suggests he knows all the bullshit mistakes Palma makes from his own experience without ever actually needing to say it.