Movie Trailer - "The Crowd Roars"

10/02/2009

Just for fun, here's the original trailer to the 1932 movie, "The Crowd Roars," starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell. Like most racing movies the writing is mediocre, the plot contrived and thin and tremendous liberties are taken with plausibility - if you know anything about the sport. The great thing about these movies is that they incorporated newsreel clips of actual races. You get the opportunity to see a number of the drivers of the era, many of them with brief speaking parts. Also, there are on-track racing scenes - most of them focusing on accidents - that you may never see anywhere else. For this movie, most were taken during races from 1928 to 1931. I don't have much knowledge of movie studio management from the 1930's or today, but it seems really odd that this movie was remade just seven years later and titled, "Indianapolis Speedway," starring Pat O'Brien in the lead role. Using many of the same racing scenes, the movies were almost identical with different actors.