Made 5 years before Burt Reynolds' "The Cannonball Run" but this is a more enjoyable anti-55 MPH national speed limit race movie.

A seemingly unrelated group of people are going to race from New York City To Los Angeles.The winner gets a gum ball machine. That premise is the funniest thing about this movie. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this movie but had no idea it was a comedy till I saw the poster 1 minute ago. With an already thin plot, this movie drops the ball on one of the characters. A mechanic who doesn't have a car(yeah right) wants to join the race.He sees an ad in the paper for a person to drive a Rolls Royce to LA and you see where this is going. He leaves the garage while it's dark out and doesn't get to the guys house till it's daylight.Lots of other things that don't make sense happen, then they get there and the mechanic doesn't go to the finish line,he delivers the car! Huh? The only reason he drove the car was to win the race and then he just gives up? Not original and not funny but worth seeing once.

As a huge fan of car chase movies, I am very surprised how many think this film is so good. It's not so bad, but nowhere near as good as I think many make it out to be.Of course, The Gumball Rally is an illegal cross-country race where the drivers compete for a gumball machine, and the glory. So they are really just racing for the helluva it, which is an interesting plot point, but takes away serious motivation, like the $100,000 offered to the winner in Cannonball, also from 1976.And Cannonball is a vastly superior film than "Gumball." Gumball does have a few things going for it, like Michael Sarrazin who is decent, and Gary Busey who is absolutely hilarious as one of the rednecks in the Camero. And of course, Raul Julia is fantastic as the sex-crazed driver who drives with Sarrazin's buddy. The girls in the Porshe are pretty. The cars are nice but truthfully there's not much action here at all, and really the story is very uninteresting. This can't touch "Cannonball" in any way, shape or form. But with "Cannonball" just recently released on DVD, I will pick up "Gumball" if it ever gets a DVD release, only because of any potential extras and it would be great to see it in widescreen and with a cleaned-up print. But really, if you are going to buy just one of the cross-country race movies, totally stay away from the "Cannonball Run" films, maybe rent "Gumball," and definitely buy "Cannonball."

Chuck Bail, a stunt performer on Steve McQueen's "Have Gun, Will Travel", contributed some memorable bits of dialogue to this script. I've lost count of the number of times I and others have repeated Raul Julia's judgment on the rear view mirror, "What's behind me is not important". Inevitably, any spectacularly ugly car we come across "looks like a jukebox". And on and on.Julia, whose participation in this film was not generally cited in obituaries, and Gary Busey were performers whose careers took off afterward.The remainder of the cast consists of moderately well known players, some still to be seen on soaps and occasionally in prime time guest shots. Normann Burton as a New York cop on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Harvey Jason as a bizarro motorcyclist stand out.As is usually the case in movies about automobile racing, lots of expert stuntwork is on display here. Scenes of pure speed, though, do not get in the way of funnymen being funny.