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Fast Company (2-Disc Limited Edition) Review

After seeing EASTERN PROMISES I tried to make good on my promise to myself to go through the rest of Cronenberg's filmography that I hadn't yet seen, and this Blue Underground offering with three of his earlier films was a great way to knock most of them off. I started with FAST COMPANY, a 1979 film about drag-strip racers in the Northern plains states. It's likable enough, with veteran tough guy character actor William Smith giving a solid performance as star "Lucky Man" Johnson who has at the beginning of the film had just about enough of his snake-oil salesman of a corporate sponsor (who else but John Saxon) and is itching to get out of the biz altogether or take charge of his own career. Likable -- but utterly predictable as well, with Johnson eventually burning his bridges and forming his own little retinue of racers and girlfriends of racers to take on his replacement, who of course respects Johnson and doesn't like the dirty pool that Saxon and his henchmen are playing to try to discredit him. Not a whole lot else to be said about it; if you're into drag racing, this might be a lot more fun; for me it was pretty mediocre. Seems like an odd choice for Cronenberg, but he was apparently a pretty serious car buff at the time.

STEREO (1969) I had seen once before, many years ago. Along with CRIMES OF THE FUTURE it was filmed on a University of Toronto site in Scarborough, Ontario. My earlier viewing of the film had been on a poor-quality bootleg and I am pleased to report that not only does the film hold up to a 2nd viewing, the transfer is quite fine. The voice-over narration to the silent-shot black-and-white footage certainly lends some verisimilitude to the pseudo-documentary conceit of an experimental psych lab devoted to telepathy. Various colleagues of the para-psychologist Luther Stringfellow discuss his experiments and theories and how they bear out in a test group of young subjects apparently capable of various ESP abilities; we watch characters wander around alone or interact with each other individually or in small groups, and their strangeness (in particular one young vampirically-dressed man of rather odd visage) alternates between a sort of normal weirdness and something....else. Are they in fact gifted? Is the narration actually in sync with what we are seeing? Watch it and find out; uncommonly fascinating, if somewhat obtuse. Worthy of comparison with Greenaway's early pseudo-documentary shorts.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970) starts out stronger, more dynamic than its predecessor, STEREO and indeed throughout the film there is more of an emphasis on "action" though it is a weird, distanced, poorly choreographed sort of action that could almost be at home in "Dr. Who"; but on the whole the film is very similar to STEREO both thematically and cinematically, apart from the major obvious difference of color film. Like the previous film it was shot silent and makes use of voice-overs, and like STEREO it is an SF film about a fictional scientific institute, in this case dedicated to finding the cause of a worldwide plague that has killed off the majority of women. Also starring as he did in the previous film is Ronald Mlodzik, who seems to perfectly convey a 60s Mod vision of an otherworldly character, in this case (apparently) a journalist -- or perhaps a physician/scientist, Adrian Tripod, doing a story -- or studying patients at an institute -- somewhere -- afflicted with this strange disease/plague/virus but not yet dead. Like the earlier film it has an unseen (apparently dead in this case) mastermind scientist character, called Antoine Rouge, who may in fact be responsible for the plague and who may also be reborn in another body. This was an extraordinarily dense and difficult work which I can only scratch the surface of on one viewing; I don't know how much I liked it, but I was awfully impressed at the intellect behind it; like Cronenberg's first feature, it bears comparison with the early works of Peter Greenaway.

All in all then, this is a must-buy for any fans of Cronenberg, or I would think, experimental cinema and the more cerebral/literary end of science fiction on film.

Fast Company (2-Disc Limited Edition) Overview

Studio: Wea-des Moines Video Release Date: 04/27/2004

Fast Company (2-Disc Limited Edition) Specifications

An early departure from director David Cronenberg's canon of visceral horror, 1979's Fast Company profiles one of his personal passions, racecars, in a gritty melodrama that also features exciting racetrack footage. Veteran toughguy William Smith is top-billed as a champion drag racer who clashes with the unscrupulous oil-company executive (John Saxon) who sponsors his team. Though lacking the gruesome clinical obsessions of his horror features (Cronenberg admits on the disc's commentary that the film was a tax shelter for its Canadian producers), Fast Company is also fascinated with internal machinery (here, car engines instead of human bodies), and it's easily Cronenberg's most approachable film, with plenty of automotive action alongside the solid performances (the cast includes B-movie queen Claudia Jennings in her final performance). --Paul Gaita

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