The Checkered Flag (1963)

The Checkered Flag (USA, 1963) 84 min color DIR-SCR: William Grefé. PROD: Herb Vendig. DOP: Jack Remy. MUSIC: Alice Simms. CAST: Joe Morrison, Evelyn King, Charles G. Martin, Peggy Vendig.

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Up-and-coming race car driver Bill Garrison (Joe Morrison), who places an honourable third in a match dominated by the aging track star Briggs Rutherford (Charles G. Martin), is offered a proposition (and then some!) by Rutherford’s estranged wife Bo (Evelyn King). If he bumps off her husband, she’ll get all his money, and she’ll pay Garrison $50,000.00 for his trouble.

This is the first film by Florida director William Grefé, whose resumé includes such 60s-70s regional drive-in delights as Death Curse of Tartu, Stanley, Mako: Jaws of Death, and of course, the immortal Bill Shatner classic, Impulse. So the story goes, he had written the screenplay, and then was offered the chance to direct, once the original director got cold feet. For a maiden effort, it’s not bad, and more interesting for the moments off the track.

Perhaps some racing aficionados might find some worth in the vintage race car footage of the first ten minutes, but in context with the film, it is rather extraneous, as we haven’t yet met any of the characters to care about who wins. And once we do, we wonder if anyone in this love triangle is worth saving.

Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford each pursue sexual conquests half their age, by throwing their money and booze around. There is never a moment where Garrison questions the morality of this murder scheme: he is as much an opportunist as Mrs. Rutherford. Mr. Rutherford on the other hand seems intrigued by the romance with her latest boy toy, as if this too were all a game. He even allows his old banker buddy to grant the money withdrawal to fund her sordid scheme, if only to see where this is all going.

Lest we think this is going to be a Sunset Blvd. with tire treads (ie- a young man being seduced by someone old enough to be his mother), the film shifts gears in its final third, when Rutherford and Garrison meet in a nightclub after a match. Each man has a younger woman on his arms (especially revealing that Garrison’s “romance” with Mrs. Rutherford is strictly business). Rutherford even tries to seduce Garrison’s girlfriend Ginger! (Everyone is a plaything to him.) After Ginger does a bikini dance with the calypso group in the club (no doubt a ploy for the producer to show off some regional and familial talent), this event turns into an even longer boozy affair back at Rutherford’s beach house, replete with limbo dancing, and a burro that Garrison buys for $47.00 after nearly blowing it off the road with his drunken driving. We think that these men will settle their differences and turn the tables on Mrs. Rutherford, but nope. In the hangover of the morning sun, these men are still nemeses on or off the track, and Garrison continues the plot to bump off Rutherford.

This is also among the earliest of the “race car” subgenre of the 1960s, which gave us such titles as The Young Racers, Thunder Alley, and Pit Stop. Often these films are more interesting for what happens off the track. The Checkered Flag is likewise more of interest for its bizarre soap opera than for race car enthusiasts. Its often plodding narrative is helped a bit by Alice Simms’ jazz score, and at least has a jaw-dropping ending you won’t soon forget. Not bad for a first effort. William Grefé would cast Morrison and Martin in similar roles for his next film, Racing Fever.

Sinister Cinema offers The Checkered Flag on DVD-R with a red-greenish trailer of the Boris Karloff-Barbara Steele chiller, The Crimson Cult.