Heart like a Wheel (1983 ) introduces The First Lady of Nitromethane

A Female World Dragster Champion in the 1980s? Shirley you must be joking

TOP FUEL is the Formula One of Drag racing. Powered by a mixture of 90% nitromethane; 10% methanol, Top Fuel dragsters are the fastest accelerating racing machines on Earth.
Shirley Muldowney claimed Top Fuel championships in 1977, 1980, and 1982, and became the first person of any gender to win two and three Top Fuel titles. The mostly forgotten 1983 movie Heart like a Wheel told the first parts of that story as an biopic, along with the pressures of managing a team and a one parent family (hot tip – recruiting your son as lead mechanic is a win win).

Taught to drive at an early age by sitting on her fathers lap, Shirley matures into the kind of 1950s girl who is moody on the back seat of her boyfiends car not because is is too ‘fresh’ but because his gear shift during the local hotrodding events are too slow.

Quickly she takes over the driving and soon the young team in racing in licensed championships. The relationship with her husband and chief mechanic is fatally harmed when he fails to back her attempts to get accredited as a female racer, and the help she receives from another racer, Connie Kalitta, which sets up her later progression from ‘Cha Cha Mulvaney’ novelty girl driver to respected multiple winner at the highest level under her own name. For all its issues with budget and scale the movie successfully portrays an extraordinary transition from 1950s wife role domesticity to World Championship professional racing river.

Muldowney is played by Bonnie Bedelia who will be better known to movie fans as the wife who fails to keep John McLane out of trouble in the first two Die Hard movies. She gets to do a lot more here earlier in her career, and carries Heart Like A Wheel well enough to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance.

Beau Bridges, brother of Jeff, gets the beefy role as Connie Kalitta, Muldowney’s initial patron, then lover, then eventual rival. Beau Bridges is too earnest and intense an actor to be as sympathetic as his brother and Kallita is pretty good casting.

Surprisingly popping up as Muldowney’s son and eventual chief mechanic is Anthony Edwards, perhaps best know later as Dr Mark Green from ER, rocking a selection of cool 70s t shirts while handling absent father figures with typical aplomb. The story of the mother-son racer-mechanic relationship is not really explored which is a shame as his story is almost as interesting as hers.

LOWLIGHTS

Such is the almost TV movie budget Heart Like A Wheel has to go to stock footage to cover later era Top Fuel Championship wins. Part of the eventual climax is 5 minutes on phone call drama followed by championship showdown against Kallita (which really happened) with more 80s cheese than real spectacle.

HIGHLIGHTS

At roughly the half way mark the movie stops being a period film for a moment and shows it’s own era, with John Carpenterish ghostly synths and mist, to depict the fiery crash at Pomona Fairgrounds in 1973. This is a key moment in the plot as this is the effective death of the sexed up ‘Cha Cha’ Muldowney persona foisted on her to sell tickets. Fire from the crash makes her sunglasses less an affectation and more of an essential part of her public identity, and time in hospital makes the estrangement from bed hopping Kallita more acute. The crash is effectively Muldowney’s “I AM IRON MAN” moment, and she ditches the Cha Cha identity from this moment forward.

Perhaps the real highlight for a film buff is a scene in which Muldowney guests as a celebrity on a tv cookery show, and corrects the tv cook on how to make real lasagna. The tv cook is played by Paul Bartel, the cult director and comedian who directed the Roger Corman Death Race 2000.