Rent Winning (1969)

Sport Drama. - Winning review by Steve

Motor racing melodrama about a driver who wins on the track but can't control his life when he's not behind the wheel. The racer falls in love with a regular girl but his obsessive compulsion to succeed shunts her off into the arms of a competing driver. Which sounds a lot like a pulpy airport novel.

The couple is played by the real life married team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and they are so convincing that it feels a little voyeuristic watching them together. When Newman catches a ruggedly handsome circuit star (Robert Wagner) in bed with Woodward it feels suddenly, shockingly transgressive!

This works as a period piece, with the cocktail hour jazz of Dave Grusin's soundtrack, the ostentatious focus-pulls, the racetrack heat-haze rising up through the Panavision, and even the sad, isolated characters. The intense, introverted loner is such an archetype it feels like an omission that Newman doesn't return home to a fridge containing just a carton of rancid milk, and a hungry cat.

This is from the golden age of the motor racing film. The director doesn't capture the excitement on the track too well, but the drama away from the circuit is interesting. Newman is as charismatic as ever. He and Woodward give quite complex performances as older, experienced people who seem destined to be alone.