Cinema: Endurance Test

The Lively Set has a gas turbine in the liveliest role. The engine propels a futuristic racing car, developed and assembled by Chrysler Corp. The rest of the cast, Hollywood-assembled, is made up mostly of bright, well-developed young folk-among them James Darren, Pamela Tiffin, Doug McClure, Joanie Sommers and Peter Mann-who are lovely to look at but not much fun to know.

The plot, which has all the bite of the blueprint in a model car kit, tells how a car-crazy boy (Darren) and a boy-crazy girl (Tiffin) find happiness at the end of an auto endurance race through Death Valley. As the dragster’s inamorata, Pamela learns that falling in love with an “intuitive genius” can be an endurance test in itself. Darren spends so much time pondering gear ratios and reassembling fuel lines that he can scarcely stay awake long enough to endanger a girl’s reputation. Of course, he regains consciousness moments before the Big Race, a tense, imaginatively shot sequence filled with screeching wheels and groaning metal as the cars hurtle toward the finish, arousing moviegoers just in time for the second feature.