Heck on Wheels

By JAY COCKS

RACE WITH THE DEVIL

Directed by JACK STARRETT

Screenplay by WES BISHOP and LEE FROST

How does Peter Fonda get himself into these things? He and his buddy Warren Gates--reunited again after Fonda's own The Hired Hand (1971) --appear as vacationers run afoul of witchcraft out in the Texas boonies. Members of a cult that plays footsie with Satan dress up in hooded sheets and build a bonfire near a gnarled old tree. Then they get right down to business and sacrifice a victim. This gives the boys across the ravine--Fonda and Gates--a mighty eyeful and a good scare. They climb back aboard their $36,000 motor home and hightail it out of there, accompanied by their anxious spouses (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) and a nervous dog (Ginger) and pursued by the entire coven.

Texas witches are a crafty lot, endowed with the power to raise high winds and impersonate seemingly innocent citizens. When Fonda and Gates make a report to the police, they are met with jocular, good-ol'-boys suspicions about the amount of liquor consumed on the night in question. Stopping at a filling station or roadside store, they catch long looks and intimations of menace. There is no safety anywhere. The dog and the wives, all of whom have been provided with roughly the same opportunities for characterization, respond similarly to the situation: they jabber and yap and tremble. The wives, however, are spared Ginger's indignity of being nailed to the door of the mobile home.

If the people who slapped together Race with the Devil are not much interested in women, they do not seem to care much for movies either. Perhaps the A.A.A. might use Race with the Devil to illustrate the perils of driving off the interstate. It seems of little use for any other purpose.

Jay Cocks

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