Film Friday: The Gumball Rally

Last week’s feature, Cannonball, was but one of two movies that came out in 1976 celebrating the infamous Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. It seemed appropriate then to give the other one a shake, too. As it turns out, The Gumball Rally stacks up to its conceptual sibling in a way that mirrors almost precisely the relationship between the Gumball 3000—the ongoing international influencer odyssey that borrowed the former’s name decades later—and its scrappy American antecedent.

The numbers tell the story here: The Gumball Rally’s budget was $4.5 million, more than five times that of Cannonball, and it looks like it. This is a slick Hollywood movie. It doesn’t feature a Roger Corman cameo. Absent is the unhinged lunacy that makes Cannonball so irresistible, in its place a sort of predictable professionalism and the kind of rote explication and pacing that you’d expect from an action-comedy of the era. Which is not itself cause for disqualification.

Directed by stuntman Chuck Bail, Gumball establishes its car-world credentials early on, with a Saul Bass–inspired title sequence that cheekily sets knowing audiences up for a straightforward homage to John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix as the eponymous rally gets underway. (Claude Lelouche’s C’était un rendez-vous also gets a nod.) For the first half-hour, it’s clear too that the filmmakers are signaling an at least passing fidelity to the real-world contest that Cannonball plainly couldn’t care less about. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

Michael Sarrazin stars as a bored Manhattan executive who, in the middle of a boardroom meeting, rings up a pal and imparts the single word gumball, to which the latter bafflingly responds, “Would you repeat that?” (It was one word, bro.) It’s the clarion call that sets in motion a gathering of oddball competitors not dissimilar to the field in Cannonball. Unfortunately, neither Sarrazin nor any of his screenmates are possessed of anything remotely approaching the unpolished charisma of Cannonball’s David Carradine; the most memorable performance here is turned in by a slumming Raul Julia as the inveterately horny Italian hotshoe Franco Bertollini.

No matter, as it’s the cars that are the actual stars. A (real) Ferrari Daytona Spyder, a (real) 427 Cobra, and a whale-tailed 911 Targa on raised white-letters are the headliners, with an appealingly hot-rodded early second-generation Camaro and a lovely 300 SL roadster in supporting roles. And there is some genuinely wonderful footage that alone makes this worth the price of admission (assuming you’re not paying more than the three bucks and change that I forked over to Jeff Bezos). Shots of the Ferrari and Shelby absolutely flying down an empty Park Avenue at six in the morning are utterly fantastic. Later we get to see them dicing it up together in the Sonoran desert—here it’s Arizona rather than California standing in for the entire continental U.S.A. west of the New Jersey Turnpike. Finally, they slide gleefully around in the L.A. river, all of it soundtracked by quite persuasive sounds of side-oiler V8 and Colombo V12 at full song and in glorious harmony. Great stuff.

There are car jokes, too, best exemplified by the E-Type that never makes it out of the garage, its crew fiddling futilely with carburetors throughout the film’s running length. At one point, eating burgers while wrenching underneath the car, one guy observes, “It’s a handsome design.” 

“I wish it ran,” replies his partner. The way it’s delivered earned a chuckle.

Unfortunately, aside from that and a scene where the unlikely source of the rendition of “Santa Lucia” accompanying one of Bertollini’s amorous adventures is revealed, the laughs are pretty few and far between. The Gumball Rally is nominally a comedy, but the gags are routine, the humor largely sophomoric, tired, and just not that funny. Crude, too—while Cannonball hardly shies away from the risqué, it feels more playful than crass. What passes for sexual humor in Gumball just comes off as exploitative, and from a 2025 perspective, kind of gross. It’s impossible at times not to feel like you’re staring through a peephole into the women’s locker room or something. Thumbs down.

The hapless cop driven to madness, a young Gary Busey’s turn as a hayseed yokel, the bickering Nuyorican couple delivering a Rolls cross-country (a striking parallel to Cannonball’s token black character in an identical role, except with a Lincoln)—none of it quite lands. The Kawasaki-borne “mad Hungarian,” Lapchik, played by a perpetually wild-eyed Harvey Jason, might be the exception, as I’m pretty sure I once encountered his real-life counterpart on a dry lake bed in California in 1988. 

That’s a story for another day.

But there you have it. While The Gumball Rally is not without its merits, the battle of 1976 Cannonball-inspired cinema clearly goes to its shoestring-budget, B-movie challenger, Cannonball.