Fast and the Furious

This is an instance where Alpha Video has done movie buffs a real service, as well as putting out a nice, exciting title in a more than decent disc edition. John Ireland and Edward Sampson's The Fast And The Furious (1954) was a fine little action thriller in its time, an early Roger Corman production that got Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson into the movie business, earning five times its cost for the fledgling distributors and permitting them to finance three more movies right off the bat. The DVD looks about as good as the movie did the last time this reviewer saw it on TV, which was back in the 1970's; except for a vertical scratch that shows up on the left-hand side of the screen for a few minutes at the beginning of the last reel, there are no major flaws in the source material. The Fast And The Furious is only ever going to look so good, even with a legendary cinematographer like Floyd Crosby doing the photography, but it looks like a lot more than $50,000 worth of movie, even considering the presence of John Ireland -- not too many years from co-starring roles in pictures like Red River -- as star and co-director and Dorothy Malone, not to mention Iris Adrian and an aging Snub Pollard in the supporting cast. It's also a lot of DVD, for a little-seen and very intense little thriller, at a budget price from Alpha -- the company's usual six chapters suffice perfectly on this particular film, which only has a relative handful of major plot sections. The audio is mastered at a decently high volume and is steady throughout. There are no extra features, but none are needed; a public domain title like this constitutes a gift, in and of itself.