Review of The California Kid (1974) by Stuart M — 06 Nov 2017

Wow, I had this pegged as a much older picture. It was filmed in 1974 (for TV no less!) but it feels exactly like a '50s hot rod drama. Martin Sheen is basically channeling James Dean as a hot rodder seeking justice for his brother, driven off the road by a homicidal policeman as part of a speed trap. Captured here is a lost piece of Americana: the small towns kept alive by the traffic directed along their mountain roads. We get to spend some time here and see the ins and outs of small town life: the way everyone knows each other, the centralness of country diners, the clannishness and nepotism.

There's not really much plot here to go around. The brother dies within five minutes. Sheen shows up just after that and immediately has a run-in with that cop. He then chooses to hang around, working on his car and making friends with the locals until the inevitable chase at the very end. Even at only an hour and ten minutes it felt long. Yet somehow it does keep occupied. It's that glacial pacing that left me so sure this was a true '50s film; that and the whole hot rod culture and the vehicles. This feels like the sort of film James Dean would appear in. Aside from such '50s films, what this film reminded me of the most was Duel, which must have come out at around the same time. Also a TV movie, also set on the roads of northern California, also built around a chase... Only that film feels very '70s and more grandiose than its scale should allow. That's largely because it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, whose tight editing and action scenes put the chases here to shame. Still, they're both good films, and if this one's not super ambitious it's still more than capable and captures a lost time in American history very well.