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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
If you have seventy minutes to spare and a soft spot for squealing tires that sound like angry cats, Straightaway is a fun little relic. People who want actual, realistic racing drama will probably hate this for its goofy logic. But if you love old B-movies where conflicts are solved by driving fast and shouting, its a pretty decent Saturday afternoon watch. 🏎️
First off, we have Tim McCoy playing our main hero, Tim Dawson. Now, McCoy is a guy you usually see wearing a giant black hat in old westerns like Trail of Courage.
Seeing him stuffed into a tiny, open-cockpit race car is just bizarre. He still moves his shoulders like he is about to draw a Colt .45 on somebody, even when he is just holding a steering wheel.
The plot kicks off when Tim and his brother Billy get fired by their crooked boss because they refuse to throw a race. Classic 1930s stuff. You gotta love the simple morality of these old scripts.
Then they get hired by a rival team owner, Pop Reeves, whose daughter Ann immediately becomes the center of a very awkward sibling rivalry. Billy wants Ann, but Ann only has eyes for Tim. It is handled with all the subtlety of a head-on collision, which I guess is fitting for a car movie.
Speaking of crashes, the villain Rogan—who is just a wonderfully greasy bad guy—tries to run Billy off the road during a big race. Instead, Rogan crashes his own car and, with his very last dying breath, blames Tim for the whole thing.
This is where the movie gets incredibly silly. A police detective, who clearly got his badge out of a cereal box, decides Tim is definitely guilty of murder.
And his brilliant plan? He tells Tim that his brother Billy has to lose the upcoming Indy 500, or else Tim goes straight to jail. I actually had to pause the movie and laugh at that. 🤷♂️
Imagine a modern cop telling a professional driver to throw a race to prove his innocence. It makes absolutely zero sense, but the movie just rolls with it like it is the most logical thing in the world.
The racing footage itself is a mix of real old-school track shots and some really obvious green-screen work. You can see the actors violently turning steering wheels that do not seem connected to anything. In a couple of shots, you can almost see the canvas background shaking behind them.
I love that kind of cheap filmmaking charm. It is not quite as dramatic as something like No Defense, but it has its own weird, clunky energy.
Ward Bond is in this too as a mechanic, which is always a treat, even if he does not have much to do besides look dirty and hold a wrench. The whole thing wraps up so fast you barely have time to process how dumb the resolution is.
Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. But it has that fast-paced, pre-code era briskness where nobody stands around talking about their feelings for too long. They just jump in the car, stomp on the gas, and hope for the best.
IMDb —
1919
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