Speed Week (1957) User Reviews

Auto Race

[boblipton · 5/10 · 27 April 2019]

Here's one of the last Sportscope shorts from RKO. It concerns itself with Speed Week. That was a series of car races on Nassau in the Bahamas. There's a fair representation of high-performance cars, a ladies event, but for me the highlight was seeing Carol Shelby, who began a career modifying production cars, most famously with the Ford Mustang, which became the Shelby Cobra. I had the strange experience of riding as a passenger in one of the Dodge Omnis he did in the 1980s. A friend had the Shelby insignias taken off and repainted it so it would look like a standard Omni. He liked to take it out on the highway to run rings around Porssches and the occasional Lotus. That thing almost did wheelies.

This short was already shot and edited when RKO collapsed, and was not seen in theaters until decades after its production.

"The girls are off and away . . . " bloviates the narrator . . .

[tadpole-596-918256 · 6/10 · 28 April 2019]

. . . as SPEED WEEK's sexist Saturday race is reduced to an all-female gasoline ghetto. Given all the Indy Car and NASCAR victories won by a plethora of distaff drivers ranging from "Janet G." to "Danica P.," women have proved that they can compete on an equal footing with their male counterparts. Segregating ANY public sporting event by sex is just as immoral, irrational, archaic, Medieval, and just plain wrong as tolerating sports leagues (or schools, lavatories, and lunch counters) ear-marked for a single race only. "Billie J. King" proved during the past century that skilled ladies can whip professional gentlemen in tennis, so exactly WHY are there STILL separate "Men's" and "Women's" categories in ALL major tennis events?! During the 1900s "Babe Z." also demonstrated that a "Tigress" is liable to win more Green Jackets than a "Tiger," but golf stubbornly plods along with its demeaning "women's teas." The Olympics could save themselves a lot of headaches by moving into NASCAR's unisex model. They would no longer feel compelled to "determine the proper sex category" of each competitor, a thankless job in this Age of Androgynous Athletes. By halving the cost of medals and eliminating such "place-holder gender parity 'sports'" as Synchronized Paddling and Rhythmic Mathematics, host nations would save tons of money. Hopefully, SPEED WEEK's chauvinistic attitude soon will become a quaint relic of the deplorable Past.

Fair but Nothing Overly Special

[Michael_Elliott · 26 September 2009]

Speed Week (1957)

** (out of 4)

Yet another entry in the hardly-ever interesting RKO/Sportscope series, which has been showing up on Turner Classic Movies the past several months. This time out we travel to Nassau, Bahamas where we see the famous "Speed Week" where various automobile races are held. Andre Baruch once again does the narration and once again nearly put me to sleep. The more I see from this series the more I'm starting to think its main goal was trying to have the same magic as MGM's Passing Parade or TravelTalks series. This series from RKO rarely comes close to either of those and this here is another example of a film that doesn't work. The narration always hits me as being a tad bit off from what we're actually seeing. When there's comedy on the screen the narration seems to be dry and dark. When there's something more dramatic on the screen then we get a light hearted narration of the events. The visuals here aren't too bad but in the end this short comes off pretty lifeless.