REVIEWED BY JONATHAN LEWIS:


HOT ROD RUMBLE. Allied Artists, 1957. Leigh Snowden, Richard Hartunian, Wright King, Joey Forman, Brett Halsey. Director: Leslie H. Martinson.

   This one’s a surprisingly entertaining oddity, a juvenile delinquent exploitation film featuring a lead actor who never made another film before or since: Richard Hartunian, an effective method actor with more than a passing similarity to Marlon Brando. He portrays Big Artie, a hot-tempered mechanic affiliated with the Road Devils, a local racing outfit. He’s got his mind dead set on local beauty Terri (Leigh Snowden, who portrayed a character named Cheesecake in Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly) and is more than willing to throw a punch or two to get his girl back after she tells him it’s over.

   So it’s no surprise that when Terri and another guy get run off the road, all the attention turns to Arnie. Even his parents seem to think he’s capable of such reckless and deadly behavior. With nowhere to turn, Arnie seeks the assistance of fellow Road Devil, Ray Johnson (Wright King). Arnie does not realize that it was Ray who was responsible for running Terri and her friend Hank off the road. Terri survives the incident, but Hank does not. This makes Arnie the primary target of his fellow Road Devils. They are ready to get their revenge.

   At times the film feels more like a teenage melodrama than a crime film. But there’s enough grittiness and small town teenage angst as well as the obligatory final car race to make Hot Rod Rumble a worthwhile movie to seek out. Add to that the exceptional jazz score by Alexander “Sandy” Courage (you can listen to the main theme here), and you’ve got yourself a movie that is as much a time capsule as a work of commercial popular entertainment. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but better than you might expect, and a movie that deserves a proper commercial DVD release.