Summary
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.
Documentary short subject depicting racing automobiles and other speedsters.
Review Excerpt
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Grantland Rice’s Speed is less a documentary than a controlled detonation: seven minutes of 35 mm nitrate kissed by gasoline and set loose on an unsuspecting audience still reeling from the Great War’s artillery lullabies. Shot on the fairgrounds of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, during the inaugural Universal Trophy Meet, the film hijacks the grammar of newsreel reportage and twists it into something feverish, erotic, almost pagan in its worship of momentum.
Watch the first close-up—a Mercer cran..."