The Last American Hero

In its infancy, NASCAR was even more of a redneck sport than it is now, inhabiting a very small niche. One of it's biggest stars, Junior Johnson, wasn't even nationally famous until Tom Wolfe wrote a series of articles about him. The Last American Hero, a film from 1973, directed by Lamont Johnson, is a fictionalized version of those articles.

In the film, Junior is given the name Jackson, but some of the core is still the same. He was the son of a moonshiner in North Carolina, and honed his skill on the road by out-running the cops on deliveries. When his father went to jail, he turned to racing to make ends meet, and ended up the first big star of the sport.

Junior is played with the usual down-home charm by Jeff Bridges. I delighted in the calm, almost bemused face that Bridges uses while he's driving at high speeds, either on dirt roads while being chased by police, or on a track maneuvering through a pack or race cars. It seems to me that one of the most essential skills a race car driver needs is to maintain calm, and Bridges shows why Junior was so good.

The rest of the film is pretty good, too. Johnson came of age in the '50s and early '60s (he retired in '65), but the film moves up the dates a bit--I'm no gearhead, but I doubt the cars we see in the film were around pre-1965. The film has a real gritty '70s look, what with the washed out cinematography (especially in the dusty small-town track where Bridges gets his start) and the simple fonts used in the titles.

The film co-stars some solid '70s actors, too, like Ned Beatty and Ed Lauter, along with an early role for Gary Busey as Bridges' brother. As the love interest is Valerie Perrine, a good-time girl who is kind of passed around among the top racers. Perrine, during my adolescence, was I think the first woman that I had "those" feelings about, and every time I see one of her old films I get very nostalgic.

I'm not sure if Junior Johnson was a hero--after all, he was a moonshiner--or why he was the "last" of such kind, but the film is a nice, simple tale that gets the job done.