150 Word Review: 'Gone In 60 Seconds' (1974)
Vroom with a view
Los Angeles in the seventies was a metropolis really feeling itself, a concrete sprawl of modern buildings, wide, open freeways filled with sleek speedsters, musclecars, and family-sized boats on wheels.
Writer-director H.B. Halicki’s sunny, grubby indie heist flick Gone In 60 Seconds follows a crooked insurance investigator hired by drug lords to steal 48 cars in five days. The movie is mostly a rat’s-eye view of a series of smooth break-ins by muttonchopped Maindrain Pace, played by the director himself, and his crew of cool-as-hell crooks. Want a brief historical tour of the slickest rides circa 1974? The first-half is shaggy fun, like dumb Altman, but then Pace is betrayed, and the last act is an incredible 40-minute car chase through the streets of the City of Angels. Pace pushes the pedal to the metal of a rubber ducky-yellow 1973 Ford Mustang. Squealing wheels. Roaring engines. Ninety-three cars are wrecked.