Speed

Grain flares, pistons glint, and the world’s first blur of petroleum modernity streaks across the perforated frame in Grantland Rice’s miniature tone-poem Speed—a 1921 kaleidoscope of chrome, dust, and daredevilry that compresses the entire Jazz-Age death-wish into seven tire-shredding minutes. We open on a dawn racetrack, dew still beading the rails, the camera crouched low as if itself a contender; then the cut rips like a checkered flag and a Mercer Series 5 explodes past, its hood strap flapping like a pennant of recklessness. Rice intercuts crankshaft close-ups—oiled steel spiraling so fast the sprockets become silver mandalas—with silhouettes of goggles pressed into leather faces, every lens reflecting the grandstands’ sea of straw boaters. A Duesenberg slingshots through a cloud of brick-red dust, the film’s perforations stuttering in empathy, while a title card (hand-lettered, jittery) crows ‘Velocity is the new narcotic!’ Suddenly we’re airborne: a Curtiss ‘Jenny’ biplane nosedives toward a lane of Stutz Bearcats, the pilot waving a silk scarf that might as well be Icarus’s frayed wing. The montage accelerates—cylinder explosions syncopated like Mamie Smith’s jazz—until the human figure itself dissolves into pure kinesis: fenders buckle, spokes fuse into silver halos, the horizon tilts 45° and becomes a ramp. In the final reel the winner’s laurel is flung into the sky, caught not by a driver but by the camera lens, the celluloid itself seeming to inhale the gasoline perfume of a century just learning to move faster than its own shadow.