Genre Comedy

Grand Theft Auto (1977)

Item: Grand Theft Auto
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Grand Theft Auto (1977)

By 1977, the car chase film had become one of Hollywood's most reliable crowd-pleasers. Audiences were piling into drive-ins across America to watch vehicles smash, spin and screech across the screen, and Roger Corman's production house, New World Pictures, was never one to miss a trend. Grand Theft Auto fits squarely into that moment: a brisk, 84-minute comedy chase picture in which a wealthy young woman borrows her father's Rolls Royce and makes a run for Las Vegas to marry the man of her choice, leaving a trail of furious parents, a scorned rival and a small army of reward-hunters in her wake. The tagline, "See the greatest cars in the world destroyed", tells you everything you need to know about its priorities.

What makes this particular film more than a footnote in the drive-in catalogue is who made it. Ron Howard was 23 years old and still best known as Richie Cunningham in the television sitcom Happy Days when Corman gave him his first shot at directing. It was the kind of deal New World Pictures was famous for: low budget, fast schedule, sink or swim. Howard, who also stars in the film alongside Nancy Morgan, Elizabeth Rogers, Barry Cahill and his own father Rance Howard, took the opportunity and ran with it. It would be some years before he became the polished but reliable studio director behind films like How the Grinch Stole Christmas or the Robert Langdon adaptations, among them The Da Vinci Code and Inferno, but the raw enthusiasm of a young filmmaker given free rein on a genre picture is very much on the screen here. The film is also worth viewing alongside American Graffiti, in which Howard had appeared as an actor just four years earlier, another film that placed cars and youth culture at its centre.

The cast is largely a collection of familiar television faces and Corman regulars, which suits the material well. Howard himself is an likeable enough leading man, and there is a loose, unforced chemistry between the performers that comes from working quickly and cheaply on something nobody pretended was high art. The stunt work, all of it practical and presumably achieved at considerable cost to the vehicles involved, gives the film a tactile energy that no amount of digital trickery can quite replicate. This is cinema made of bent metal and burning rubber, and it wears that proudly.

Grand Theft Auto (1977), Ron Howard’s directorial debut, is a gloriously cheesy, no-frills car chase comedy that absolutely belongs in the same garage as Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and those other wild, rubber-burning romps of the late 70s. It’s got that same family-friendly, tongue-in-cheek energy, fast cars, dumb cops, last-minute escapes, and a whole lot of slapstick. It’s not deep, it’s not smart, and it definitely doesn’t take itself seriously, and honestly, that’s the point. The stunts are practical, the crashes are loud, and the humour is broad enough to make kids laugh and adults smirk. There’s a wholesome, small-town charm to it all, like a live-action cartoon with engines. You can tell everyone on screen is having a blast, and that energy is contagious. Of course, by modern standards, it’s pretty thin, paper-thin plot, flat characters, and jokes that haven’t aged perfectly. But as an early example of the car chase craze and a snapshot of 70s drive-in cinema? It’s a solid time capsule. Forgettable as art, but totally enjoyable as junk food fun. Roll up, rev the engine, and enjoy the ride.

For me, that drive-in quality is actually a big part of the charm. Films like this were never meant to outlast the summer they were released, and the fact that it has, even as a curio, says something about the genuine fun baked into it. I find it hard to be too hard on something so cheerfully unpretentious. If you go in expecting Kubrick, that's on you. Go in expecting noise, chaos and a young director learning his craft at speed, and you'll have a perfectly decent evening. Sometimes junk food is exactly what you fancy.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1977 | Watched: 2025-09-12

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Trailer

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