Fast Company is a 70s B-movie through and through. Lonnie, nicknamed Lucky Man and played by William Smith (Red Dawn, Any Which Way You Can), is an aging drag racer bankrolled by a large oil company called FastCo. The company representative (John Saxon) is a scheming sleazeball only interested in money no matter what its source. Toss in Lonnie's up-and-coming driver protege, a competing driver and a long-distance girlfriend (exploitation queen Claudia Jennings in her final role) and it's not hard to see the slots where everything fits.
What doesn't quite fit is Fast Company's place in Cronenberg's career. There's nothing of the fascination with extremes of behavior that mark his other films and while it has a sharp and striking visual appeal (courtesy cinematographer Mark Irwin who worked on five other Cronenberg films) Fast Company is really an of-the-moment film that's briefly entertaining but soon fades away. The acting has a pressed-for-time bluntness that's entirely appropriate for the subject, the music is embarassing sub-Springsteen (some of it by third-tier rocker Michael Stanley) and you're not going to be surprised by anything. In fact it looks like Cronenberg was more interested in the drag racing than the characters since quasi-documentary segments make up big chunks of the film (at one point even including a superimposed time clock to measure a race's progress).
Still, forget the Cronenberg connection and Fast Company has some drive-in charm. William Smith's filmography stretches to almost 300 films and he displays some of the weathered charisma that sustained such a run. Despite being second-billed Jennings isn't in the film much, really appearing only in the second half (despite a brief phone-call sequence earlier that looks like a post-production reshoot). Even then she doesn't have much to do. In real life Jennings' career and personal life had been going through a rough patch (she had just been passed over as a replacment in Charlies Angels apparently due to the network's uneasiness about her Playboy past) and it's possible either that her role was reduced or she was brought in purely for marquee value. John Saxon, of course, is one of those actors who bring a welcome intensity to any role they play and he keeps the potentially one-dimensional promoter plausible and at times almost more substantial than the "good guys."
The disc extras include interviews with Saxon, William Smith and Mark Irwin but the highlight is an amiable commentary by Cronenberg that actually makes Fast Company more appealing. It's an interesting look into the tricks and turns of low-budget filmmaking, going from financing to sound design to second-unit work, but also discussing aspects of real-life drag racing culture. That's something Cronenberg knew a bit about since he had a serious interest in various forms of auto racing that led to making Fast Company. He addresses the film's status as apparently non-auteur work-for-hire by pointing out that, as with any artist, there are a lot of things personally important to him which never appear in his films. Overall, he hits the point when he says, "I really wanted it to be a classic B-movie with the things that are lovable about B-movies." Fast Company isn't a classic but at least deserved to be rescued from near-oblivion.
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by Lang Thompson
