Vroomy Movie

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GREASED LIGHTNING Directed by Michael Schultz Screenplay by Kenneth Vose, Lawrence Du Kore, Melvin Van Peebles and Leon Capetanos

Greased Lightning purports to be the biography of Wendell Scott, who may be described loosely as the Jackie Robinson of auto racing--the first black man to cross the color line in his sport. One says "purports" because it is almost impossible to believe that any real life could so unerringly follow the classic lines of so many biopix past. The cheerfully determined young man struggling to support his family while trying to fulfill his ambitions, the opposition from the Establishment in his field, the early heartbreaks, the ultimate triumph--all this is the familiar stuff of a hundred celluloid dreams that have been sold to us as the real goods on popular contemporary heroes.

And yet one feels guilty, something of a crosspatch, for raising even a minor caveat about this engaging, low-key, low-budget movie, full of nice people, bouncy car chases, vroomy racing sequences. Scott is played with a sort of quizzical intelligence by Richard Pryor in a performance very different from his equally effective role as the jivey thief in Silver Streak. There is about Pryor, and the picture as a whole, both earnestness and the sense to throw it away; though if you stop to think, Scott's career--even if it was not precisely as set forth in the film--required even more courage than Robinson's did.

Consider: he was operating not in the national pastime, but--in the beginning anyway--at the lowest, least publicized levels of a sport that does not interest very many liberal-minded, middle-class people. Scott broke in on tiny, rural dirt tracks in the Deep South, getting his first opportunities to race only because promoters thought crowds might be interested in seeing a Negro crash and burn. He could expect no mercy from the white stock-car drivers, very few of whom carried N.A.A.C.P. membership cards in their wal lets. The worst Robinson could expect from his prejudiced competitors was something like a spike wound; the men Scott was running against had, at every race, the means to kill him and in all like lihood get away with it. Moreover, as a black he could not hope to attract well-heeled sponsors.

In short, what we have here is a little miracle of perseverance, all the more effective for the good-humored manner in which the story is presented. Beau Bridges does a pleasant turn as a white driver who becomes Scott's friend and, later, mechanic. Pam Grier, up out of the unlamented blaxploitation pictures of a few years back, is patient and supportive as Scott's long-suffering wife. Director Schultz, as he demonstrated in last year's Car Wash, has a loose, uninsistent style that gives the picture the quality of a yarn being retold on someone's back porch. The film will put many in mind of Rocky, but its real antecedents are in the '30s, when directors like Frank Capra were giving us inspiring little slices of life about ordinary people accomplishing extraordi- nary things when their own determination was sustained by good friends and tolerant family. There is not a more likable movie currently on view than Greased Lightning.

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