The Gumball Rally (1976)

Simply Perfect

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A seemingly unrelated group of people are going to race from New York City To Los Angeles.The winner gets a gum ball machine. That premise is the funniest thing about this movie. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this movie but had no idea it was a comedy till I saw the poster 1 minute ago. With an already thin plot, this movie drops the ball on one of the characters. A mechanic who doesn't have a car(yeah right) wants to join the race.He sees an ad in the paper for a person to drive a Rolls Royce to LA and you see where this is going. He leaves the garage while it's dark out and doesn't get to the guys house till it's daylight.Lots of other things that don't make sense happen, then they get there and the mechanic doesn't go to the finish line,he delivers the car! Huh? The only reason he drove the car was to win the race and then he just gives up? Not original and not funny but worth seeing once.

When bored executive Michael Bannon utters the word 'Gumball' various people across the United States drop whatever they are doing and head for New York City. They are all going to take part in the highly unofficial and highly illegal Gumball Rally; a race from New York to Long Beach, California. With the exception of one man on a motorcycle each team is made up of two drivers in a car; mostly high performance sports cars but also a van, a Rolls Royce and a fake police car; the only rule to the race is that there are no rules! Not everybody is there to enjoy the event; Lt. Roscoe, a California policeman, is determined to arrest as many of the drivers as he can... he just has to catch them first. Not all of the competitors will make it to California; in fact some of them won't get out of New York and those that do make it will have to go through various scrapes involving the police, other competitors, a motorcycle gang and even a flock of butterflies! This film isn't chock full of A-list actors, the only ones I recognised were Gary Busey and Raul Julia, however everybody performed well and because of the lack of big names it was hard to guess who would get to the end and who would drop out near the start. The race itself had plenty of hilarious incidents and as the drivers approached the end it actually got fairly tense as the viewer wills their personal favourite to win; my personal favourite was Lapchick the Mad Hungarian motorcyclist... he was hilarious! Filmed long before CGI the stunts are all real and for the most part performed by the actors making it seem far more real than more modern films where the director would no doubt give in to the temptation of adding lots of CGI explosions and crashes! The premise of an unofficial race had been done before and has been done again since but this is one of the best examples of the genre and because it contains no offensive material it can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

When you see this you'll immediately notice the similarities to Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run.With Smokey and the Bandit you'll recognize the plot line about the can't catch anyone police detective. He tries and tries but just can't get the dastardly illegal speedsters.This was obviously a first attempt and recreating, on film, the Cannonball Run road race of the early 70's. Imo, this film is a lot funner than the original Cannonball Run film of the early 80's. There are no stars and a lot fast and really cool cars. A lot of the situations in this have 0 plausibility but I think that wasn't a major focus when this was made. The cars are the stars of this film..and there are some seriously cool ones to say the least.There's no doubt that this film influenced the two 2 above mentioned films in this review so if you want a little fun in your day and fast cars are what gets you going', try Gumball Rally and hang on to your seats...It's gonna be a fast ride.

Chuck Bail, a stunt performer on Steve McQueen's "Have Gun, Will Travel", contributed some memorable bits of dialogue to this script. I've lost count of the number of times I and others have repeated Raul Julia's judgment on the rear view mirror, "What's behind me is not important". Inevitably, any spectacularly ugly car we come across "looks like a jukebox". And on and on.Julia, whose participation in this film was not generally cited in obituaries, and Gary Busey were performers whose careers took off afterward.The remainder of the cast consists of moderately well known players, some still to be seen on soaps and occasionally in prime time guest shots. Normann Burton as a New York cop on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Harvey Jason as a bizarro motorcyclist stand out.As is usually the case in movies about automobile racing, lots of expert stuntwork is on display here. Scenes of pure speed, though, do not get in the way of funnymen being funny.