SPEED

US, 1936, 70 minutes, Black and white.
James Stewart, Wendy Barrie, Una Merkel, Ted Healy, Ralph Morgan.
Directed by Edwin L. Marin.

Speed is a story of cars, their making and testing. It was an early film of James Stewart who portrays a driver who is working on a new carburettor. He loves driving fast – and there are some scenes of testing cars at great speeds which will entertain the car enthusiasts. However, he is a practical person, not wanting to work in the office or in theory. He encounters a young woman who is a PR for the firm – in fact, the niece of the owner. They meet, he falls in love, they clash, he misinterprets her interest in a worker in the office.

Ted Healy, the founder of The Three Stooges, portrays his assistant, Gadget, getting some humorous lines, as well as some ironic romantic scenes.

The film is fairly conventional – though, in the tour of the car manufacturing company, it is almost like a documentary portraying how cars were made, assembled, tested in the 1930s.

The film is an opportunity to see James Stewart at the age of twenty-seven, thin and lanky, but with something of the screen persona he was to employ over the next sixty years or so.