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I came upon The Fast and the Furious by chance, while going through Roger Corman's filmography. The title obviously caught my attention. The same year Corman directed his western Five Guns West, he produced and wrote the story for this car racing flick. No doubt that these days, the title is more closely associated with Vin Diesel and his preference of American muscle cars over Japanese whaddayacallems (you can see I'm a real grease monkey). This is where that franchise got its name from.

The plot, however, bears no resemblance to the 2001 film or its consequent sequels, though they occupy the same territory of hot wheels, hard babes and misunderstood outlaws. As conceived by Corman, The Fast and the Furious is about a man, played by John Ireland (who also co-directs), who breaks out of jail after being wrongfully convicted of murder and heads for the border, kidnapping Dorothy Malone for use of her sports car along the way. His cunning idea to slip out of the country undetected before the cops catch up to him? Sign up for a dangerous cross-border race that ends in Mexico.

Universal bought the title rights to use it on Rob Cohen's film, but not the film/story itself, because theirs was quite different, obviously (they transplanted the plot from Point Break instead). There's already a movie that rehashed the same plot anyway, which was Adam Rifkin's The Chase.

The Fast and the Furious starts off almost like the Poverty Row B-noirs: low-budget, flimsy set-up, focusing on an anti-hero, a gun, and a reluctant-but-capable broad. It's not noir, though. Far from it. Rather than get into the grimy twists and moral turbulence, this movie suddenly turns into Cannonball Run. It's sloppy schlock, with most of the movie being the two leads talking while driving in one continuous shot after the next. Fun trivia: the movie was lensed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who is none other than the father of David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

So it's not a very well-made movie, but it is amusing to watch for the sheer straight-faced silliness of it. This is Roger Corman before he developed a taste for exploitation, but his glee and sense of showmanship already shows. After all, who else would set up a crime thriller about an innocent man hunted by the cops for a murder, only to use it as an excuse to film racing footage?

And now for something I don't get to do often with these Watch Out! entries... The Fast and the Furious has fallen into public domain, so you can easily find plenty of copies online legally. To do our part in saving you time, I've embedded the entire film below.

Watch Out! is a feature on JustPressPlay where Arya Ponto showcases lesser-known, lesser-appreciated and often bizarre small films that are cool and deserve to get some attention. Venture here to see all previous entries.