Race cars! Airplanes landing at the Indy 500! Murder on the race track! The 1935 B-movie ‘Red Hot Tires‘ by Warner Bros packs all of this plus a high-speed romance into a 61-minute run time.
Wallace Storm and Robert Griffin are rival racers at the Stanford open-wheel racing team. Both are in love with the team boss’ daughter Patricia Stanford; she’s both the engineer and mechanic on the Stanford Special. To win the race (and the girl) Griffin plots against Storm by installing a spike along the side of his car to slice through his competitor’s tires (right out of ‘Speed Racer‘) when they inevitably interlock wheels. But Griffin is accidentally killed in the wreck which he himself devised, and Storm is sent to prison for murder.
While Storm is rotting in prison, Patricia discovers the hidden spike on Griffin’s car and realizes that it proves Storm’s innocence. Meanwhile, Storm’s best friend Bud takes the direct approach and breaks his pal out of jail! Now on the lam, the two men make their way down to Brazil, where Storm adopts a fake name and a real mustache and becomes a local racing hero. But one letter from his old flame Patricia convinces Storm to return to the US to drive the Stanford Special at the Indianapolis 500 (oddly referred to as the Dayton 500 to avoid copyright issues) despite possibly being thrown in the clink. To avoid the authorities, fugitive Storm lands his airplane on the infield of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway mid-race, setting up the climactic ending.
A-list Hollywood actress Mary Astor (‘The Maltese Falcon‘) plays Patricia, who despite being a female in the 1930s racing scene, is respected by the male characters. Depicted as smart, skilled, and confident, Patricia proves Storm’s innocence and later jumps into his race car as the riding mechanic to help him compete in the big race. What more could a guy ask for in a dame!
This kooky little film has some comic relief in the form of Bud, Storm’s best friend. Bud often mentions his girlfriend Maggie, but his friends start realizing that they have never met or even seen her; they suspect she is made up. Late in the movie, Bud meets a pretty young girl at the race track, serendipitously named Maggie (played by Mary Treen, cousin Tilly from “It’s a Wonderful Life” with beloved Jimmy Stewart) and falls in love at first sight. Why did Bud make up girlfriend Maggie? Some of today’s film buffshave interpreted that Storm and Bud are gay lovers hiding their homosexuality. Bud actually breaks his ‘best friend’ out of jail and then runs off to South America with him. Quite a queer thing to do for just a friend.
The best part of this fast film is the racing, and there’s plenty of it! Before the go-kart was invented by Art Ingels in 1956, folks raced ‘small cars’ called Midgets as entry-level motor racing since the 1930s. They looked very similar to ‘big cars’ the professionals drove (also called Championship Cars or ‘champ cars’) in AAA National Championship races like Indianapolis. Midget cars like those raced in the opening scene were homebuilt contraptions sometimes powered by old motorcycle engines or outboard motors from boats. Looking like scaled down champ cars, Midgets can easily be identified by their tiny wheels and the single driver cockpit, compared to the driver and riding mechanic combination raced in champ cars.
Being a B-movie, ‘Red Hot Tires‘ didn’t have a huge special-effects budget in 1935 but it uses a combination of stock footage from actual races, miniature models for crash scenes and rear projection of the actors in ‘stationary’ race cars. OK, it isn’t ‘Grand Prix‘ but it has enough redeeming qualities that in 1978 a copy of the film was preserved at the Library of Congress. ‘Red Hot Tires‘ actually held up pretty well, considering it was filmed almost a century ago!