In most ways this is a typical Warner Brothers product from the 30s or 40s. Plenty of action, fast dialog, a slap across the cheek, a punch in the snot locker, a young woman heartbroken, professional male solidarity, conflict within the organization, characters with names like Joe and Eddie and Spud, racing cars skidding perilously around the turns on a race track, and final redemption.
Howard Hawks was fond of racing cars at the time, and remained so, but there isn't much of the director's signature visible here. Well, maybe some emerging part of a pattern. When practicable, the camera stays at eye level. And Ann Dvorak is hooked up with Cagney, she frets over whether she's "good enough." It must have been one of Hawks' favorite phrases because he used it, or variations on it, often over the next thirty years. Cary Grant to Jean Arthur in "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), "You'd better be good." John Wayne to pal Ward Bond in "Rio Bravo" (1959), "You're not good enough." Sometimes Hawks adds or substitutes another favorite phrase: "Good luck to ya."
The 20 and especially the 30s seem to have been decades in which hordes of daredevils were competing for speed records in one vehicle or another. Aviators like Wiley Post and Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh became famous. If you disappeared in the wild blue yonder, like Amelia Earhardt, they named a brand of luggage after you. The same thing was happening in automobile races here on earth. Half a dozen famous racing car drivers play themselves in this script. The only one that I'd ever heard of was Wilbur Shaw, but I assume at the time they had an abundance of celebrity.
If there's nothing much new about the plot, there is one unusual scene. Frank McHugh, a Warners stalwart, is a driver whose car bursts into flame and who burns to death on the track. The shot of McHugh holding his face and screaming amid the flames is startling. And the other drivers having to pass through the smoke and the odor of McHugh's burning body is more literal than anything Hawks was to do with violence later in his career.
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