The Last American Hero Review

• 12th Sep 2011

A curious release. I would imagine its release is set to coincide with the release of the recent Pixar sequel Cars 2; while their kids can enjoy the animated adventures of lightning McQueen, so dads can enjoy this very typical early to mid seventies film about NASCAR racing drivers in Hicksville North Carolina. The story is about Elroy ‘Junior’ Jackson (played by Jeff Bridges), a moonshiner from the North Carolina backwoods who grew to know cars and how to race them by escaping the police on moonshine runs. On one run he runs into a police blockade and due to his age it is his father who is arrested for bootlegging and is sent to prison for his efforts. To raise money to get his father out of prison Junior uses his skills as a driver and enters himself into stock car races. He eventually meets a promoter (Ned Beatty) and his career takes off from there. The story is based off the real life story of Junior Johnson, one of the first NASCAR champions who won over 50 titles as a stock car racer between his first title in 1955 and his retirement in 1966. Johnson himself was from North Carolina and was a moonshiner and served as a technical advisor on the film. Johnson was known for a stunt known as the ‘bootleg turn’, that is while speeding doing a 180 degree handbreak turn and turning back on the police who were chasing him. He served 11 months for his moonshine runs before going into the more legit adrenalin sport of stock car racing.

Bridges looks very fresh faced here. He had burst onto the movie scene just two years previously as Duane Jackson in Peter Bogdanovich’s excellent coming-of-age drama The Last Picture Show (a role he would revive twenty years later in Texasville) playing a young hothead in a small and dull Texas town. He then starred in the youthfully cast and naturalistic western Bad Company (1972) before taking on this role and quietly affirming his place as a star following in the footsteps of his father Lloyd Bridges and brother Beau (the brothers would star together years later in The Fabulous Baker Boys, 1989). In many ways The Last American Hero is a very typical film of the period. There were several films made in the seventies that celebrated either life on the road, in small American towns or even celebrated hillbilly antics, racing and bootlegging and usually starred Burt Reynolds in such films as White Lightning (1973) and Gator (1976). Valerie Perrine (better known as Gene Hackman’s bimbo girlfriend in Superman) plays a rather easy southern gal who is rather taken by Junior but seems to end up with his rivals, probably because the good looking Junior is also a nice boy and not the usual rough necks who will inevitably treat her badly she usually ends up with. In many ways this girl and her relationship with Junior is one of the more tragic aspects of the story, but we are aware that by the end of the film Junior will find fame and success whereas Perrine’s character of Marge will be less lucky.

The climactic race sequence is well put together and suitably exciting and was shot at the Concord racing track in North Carolina, now sadly no longer as it has since become a housing estate. As already mentioned it is a very typical example of a seventies film and is very much of its period, but growing up becoming a fan of cinema I always enjoyed these types of films that are less seen on out television screens today and is, therefore, a welcome release for myself at any rate. This is a good transfer and does justice to the formerly grainy images that were previous on the television screens.

Chris Hick