Movie Review: The Last Chase, Starring a Porsche 917 (and Lee Majors)

This post started, as some of mine do, with a question about cars from my brother Jeff.

He texted me from Jerusalem, Israel, wanting to know whether the Porsche in a 1981 movie titled “The Last Chase,” starring Lee Majors, was a real Porsche or a replica.

Not knowing anything about the movie, I told him it was likely to be a real 911, since they weren’t that expensive then, so nobody would have bothered making a replica. He texted back that it wasn’t a 911, but something that looked “more like a Chaparral.”

Intrigued, I did an image search and he’s correct. While it’s easy to tell a Porsche 917 from one of Jim Hall’s racers, the 917 in The Last Chase does indeed look more like a Chaparral than like Porsche’s iconic 911 road car.

My brother’s question answered, I proceeded to watch the film, which is posted in its entirety on YouTube (you can watch it below the jump).

My next thought: how did I not know about this movie?

Most movies about cars are pretty well known in the enthusiast community. Serious films like “LeMans” and comedies like “The Love Bug,” artistic films like Ron Howard’s “Rush” and dreck like Sly Stalone’s “Driven,” they’re all familiar to car guys. If that’s the case, how come so few of us know about a movie that essentially stars one of the fastest, perhaps the most notoriously fast race car ever: the all-conquering Porsche 917? I’m pretty sure that the 917 in the film is real. There were about 80 examples made of the 917 and its variants and they weren’t million dollar museum pieces then. In 1981, it would have been just another old race car, the 917 having last competed in 1973 in the Can Am series.

Now that I’ve watched all of The Last Chase, I wonder if something with a similar story line could even be made by Hollywood today. Actually, The Last Chase might not have been able to be made by Hollywood in 1981 either, since director Martyn Burke’s movie was partially underwritten by the Canadian Film Development Corporation (not to be confused with Canada’s National Film Board), but I suspect that the themes involved might be even less likely to find an interested ear among environmentally conscious Tesla driving film executives in today’s Los Angeles.

It’s not great art. The Last Chase was cheesy enough to get the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment.

The acting is about as mechanical as you’d expect from a guy who made his bones as an actor playing someone who was part machine. The plot, derived from at least a half-dozen other movies or books I could identify (Vanishing Point, The Stand, Batman & Robin, Death Race 2000, and every buddy and coming of age picture you’ve seen, for starters), has more holes than a round of Jarlsberg. There were even some serious continuity and setting issues. Majors’ teenage sidekick gets to drive the car for “the first time” a couple of scenes after we’ve seen him at the wheel while they were effecting a getaway from a checkpoint. Right after they leave Boston they appear to be driving through the desert and mountains of Arizona, not New England. Still, I had a pleasant time watching it and, even at its cheesiest moments, there was always the 917 to admire.

The story starts with a flashback to a plague that wipes out millions, including the wife and child of Majors’ character, Franklyn Hart. Hart had been a famous and successful race car driver until he was involved in an accident with two fatalities, causing him to lose his nerve. Sometime after the plague, “the oil ran out” (remember, the film was made in 1981, shortly after the 1973 and 1979 oil crisis). A bureaucratic and totalitarian federal government has confiscated all private vehicles. Only public transportation or bicycles are available to the public, but every totalitarian regime needs police to keep people in line, so there are police cars, of a sort. The police drive electric golf carts.

Hart works for a government transportation agency, spending his days giving speeches as the “famous ex racer” now extolling the joys of public transportation. He spends his nights dreaming about his family and his former career. He spends his days chafing against the regime and his role supporting it.

Pirate television broadcasts from “Free California,” which has broken away from the regime and still celebrates what was formerly known as the American way of life, including cars, induce Hart to reassemble his Porsche 917 racer. To avoid confiscation, he’d disassembled it and buried it under his garage.

There’s a side plot involving a teenaged hacker played by Chris Makepeace, of My Bodyguard, the troublemaking son of a regime leader, who gets his kicks by breaking into the government’s computer and surveillance systems.

Hart’s disaffection is becoming noticeable to his colleagues and the regime. As he is about to be arrested, right after he discovers the boy in his own home (a point not exactly explained), he blasts out of his garage in the 917, headed for the west coast and freedom. The oil may have run out but there are still thousands of abandoned gasoline stations dotting the land, each with underground tanks and a few gallons of petrol in their sumps, accessible with a hand pump. I’m not sure how well a finicky race engine like the 917 has would run on years’ old stale fuel, but that’s probably the tiniest hole the plot has.

While the state can keep an eye on his progress, they don’t have anything with which they can chase him. The police EVs don’t have a prayer of catching a 917. Apparently, there is no longer an Air Force either, because all they can come up with to chase Hart, the boy, and the 917 Porsche is a 1950s-era F-86 Sabre fighter jet, and its former pilot, played by Burgess Meredith. Meredith supervises the plane’s recommission and takes to the skies. His sexual banter with “his baby” borders on the creepy, but then Meredith made a career of playing eccentrics.

Despite the film’s many shortcomings, it’s still an entertaining 105 minutes, particularly if you have a thing for race cars or vintage military aircraft. My guess is that they settled on a F-86 in the plot because that’s what the filmmakers could rent. Either way, the aerial footage of the F-86 in its JPS-esque black-and-gold livery is as fun to watch as are scenes of the 917 in the Arizona desert.

I won’t spoil the rest of your fun by telling you how it turns out, but that’s not the important thing about The Last Chase. That thing would be the bright red Porsche 917 that really stars in the film.