Summary
A tire-scorched odyssey unfurls when Speed Carr—equal parts daredevil and drifting ghost—accepts the lunatic invitation of a Depression-era cannonball from Manhattan’s sodium-lit piers to the Pacific’s bruised horizon. Each mile metastasizes into a hall of mirrors: federal agents mistake his thunderbird roadster for a bootlegger’s armory, a carnival queen with a .38 in her garter strips him of his surname, and the Mojave itself yawns open like a bankrupt theater where mirages project alternate histories of who he might have been. Between New York’s elevated iron arteries and Chicago’s jazz-soaked underpasses, Carr abandons his original ride—an open-wheeled coffin lacquered in patriotic vermilion—trading it for a moon-shined Auburn whose silver skin peels away like old film stock. Identity becomes a relay baton: chauffeur, fugitive, stunt double, corpse-to-be. Meanwhile, the coast-to-coast racetrack metastasizes into a celluloid Möbius strip; newsreel crews splice his visage into wanted posters, and rival drivers turn pursuers, coveting the $50,000 purse that nobody seems able to claim. By the time the Sierra Nevada swallows the sun, Carr’s final disguise is less a mask than a negative space—an erased man barreling toward a finish line that keeps divorcing itself from geography.
Synopsis
Auto racer Speed Carr enters a marathon race across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles. He encounters numerous obstacles not related to the race and must switch identities and vehicles before he can finish.
Director
Wanda Hawley, Tully Marshall, Wallace Reid, Theodore Roberts
