The Fast and the Furious (1955)
A truck driver wrongly accused of murder breaks out of custody and kidnaps a sports-car racer, forcing her along as he flees toward the Mexican border. He enters her car in a cross-border road race under a false name, and as the miles pass, her suspicion of her captor starts to give way to something else.
Produced for Roger Corman’s fledgling American Releasing Corporation — the outfit that would soon become AIP — The Fast and the Furious was co-directed by and starred John Ireland, who took the job partly to help bankroll the young studio’s first slate of releases. Its unrelated twenty-first-century namesake kept nothing but the title, which Universal purchased separately decades later.
Background
The Fast and the Furious was made for Roger Corman’s young American Releasing Corporation, the company that would later become American International Pictures. John Ireland, who also stars, shared the directing credit with Edward Sampson, and the production was a modest independent effort shot on a budget suited to the studio’s first releases. Dorothy Malone plays the sports-car racer whose car becomes the fugitive’s getaway vehicle, and Iris Adrian appears in a supporting role. The film’s title is unrelated to the 2001 franchise that later borrowed it. Universal bought the title separately, but the original 1955 picture was never part of that purchase, and it is in the public domain.
What to watch for
Watch the uneasy partnership between the truck driver on the run and the racer he kidnaps. The film plays their dynamic across the drive toward the Mexican border, as her fear of him slowly gives way to grudging interest. The cross-border road race is the picture’s most kinetic stretch, with the car and the open highway doing most of the work the budget could not provide elsewhere. At about 73 minutes the story moves briskly, and it never lingers on its noir trappings for long. The film is a useful example of how Corman’s early productions combined a simple premise with fast pacing and a clear commercial hook.
