Greased Lightning (1977), dir. Michael Schultz. Trylon Cinema, Sunday, November 27.

Greased Lightning is the story of Wendell Scott, the first Black race car driver. He is played by Richard Pryor, and at one point in the film, after Scott has been injured in an accident and recovering in a hospital (covered in bandages), his wife, Mary (Pam Grier), urges him to give up racing. He’s older, she says with tears in her eyes, and he just can’t keep up. Furthermore…

Mary: They got the sponsors… they got the best cars and the best mechanics. What you got?

That question sums up the problems with Greased Lightning. I enjoyed the hell out of the first half of this little film, starring two titans of Black comedy in the 1970s, Richard Pryor and Cleavon Little, and Pam Grier, already an icon for her Blaxploitation films. The first half is all about our man Wendell coming back from World War II, buying a taxicab and hoping to raise enough money to open a garage. But there’s no money for poor people in rural Virginia, less for a Black man, and so he ends up racing bootleg liquor for his pal, Peewee (Little), and outwitting the local sheriff (Vincent Gardenia). This is pure 70s car-chase fun, our heroes outwitting the dopey cops, who of course can’t just be outrun, but they have to be choking on dust and blindly swerve off the road and into lakes and through barns that come crashing down on other dumb hayseeds. That’s thoroughly entertaining.

The second half, when Scott starts his racing career, begins promisingly enough. Perhaps because director Michael Schultz is Black does the story (written by four people, one of whom was Melvin van Peebles) not flinch from the racism that Scott faced. There’s more use of the n-word than a Tarantino film, and most of the white folks are horrible and vicious. That’s honest. The racing is fabulous–I don’t know how they did it, but it totally looks like Richard Pryor and the other actors (including Beau Bridges) are actually driving these cars, and driving them fast and recklessly. Mix the competition from the race with our hero’s need to overcome these bigoted freaks, and that’s compelling cinema.

But Greased Lightning should have been a half an hour longer, to develop Scott’s story. Criminy, I have never in my life seen such abrupt temporal transitions in any movie or TV show in my life. The first instance was so bad, and happened right at the changeover (the film was screened on 35mm at the Trylon), that for a few minutes I was convinced a reel was missing or out of place. In that scene, Beau Bridges’ Hutch, once a competitor but now fast friend to Scott, is frustrated because his own car has broken, and is beyond repair. Hutch is filthy, covered in mud and oil. Scott, laughing, starts plundering Hutch’s engine for parts that he needs, because, he reasons, Hutch can’t use them, right? Hutch, angry, begrudgingly begins to help install these parts into Scott’s engine, and Wendell’s main mechanic, Woodrow (Richie Havens, who sings the bizarre theme song), states that they could sure use a second mechanic, so why doesn’t Hutch join their crew? Click, slam, the new reel comes on and Hutch is cleaned up, wearing a cowboy hat, the whole crew has outfits, there’s a new car for Scott to drive, covered in ads for sponsors and they’re ready to race. What the fuck? At the prior point, Scott barely had eight nickels to rub together. Wouldn’t the whole package we see in the next scene–uniforms, new car, sponsors, the money raised from winning races or pried from skeptical white sponsors or the poorer Black community–be a fascinating story? Holy shit, I want to see how we got to this point.

And that happens throughout the next half of the movie. The lyrics in Richie Havens’ theme song keeps bringing us up to date because cinematically they couldn’t be bothered or had to race against the clock, the clock being a forced amount of time to tell this tale. It’s ludicrous, these clumsy transitions, especially since the racing scenes were so effective. And I get the feeling, I strongly get the feeling, that it is because Warner Brothers didn’t want to pay the money to shoot enough of this story. You could say about Greased Lightning what Mary says to Wendell in the hospital: They got the sponsors… they go the best cars and the best mechanics. What you got? Well, Mr. Schultz and Company, you got only this much money and you got only this much film and you got only this much time, ’cause we got to get those drive-in ticket sales. Your white counterparts got all the money they need, you’re lucky we’re letting you make this movie.

Might I also note that the movie didn’t get a lot of attention from critics, including Siskel & Ebert, who appear not to have written a review.

Clearly, the filmmakers thought this story was very significant, as Richard Pryor, Pam Grier and Cleavon Little are no slouches, and probably not that cheap, and Richie Havens was a pretty big musical name to put in a small role. For Christ’s sake, Julian Bond has a role in this movie!

I also keep forgetting how effective Richard Pryor was as a performer. You get this in his stand up, this crazy, angry man who can suddenly veer into heartbreaking compassion. Pryor has a look he uses in his films now and then, a look I don’t see in a lot of actors, a look of hurt, of genuine hurt, covered by a slight smile when fending off being slighted or disrespected. Here, at a first dinner with his character’s wife’s family, the father and the rest of the clan laughs outright at his dream of becoming a race car driver. Pryor’s Scott simply says, “yeah” and smiles, differently from other moments in the movie, and it’s as if Pryor is summoning up past wounds. Beautiful. I should see more of his movies.