Biopic and Documentary Week: Blast from the Past: Jonathan Kaplan’s Heart like a Wheel

Coming from a family of amateur drag racers (and a family where women outnumber men), it’s no surprise that my super-duper #1 female idol as a kid was Shirley Muldowney. A three-time National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel champion, Muldowney has been a part of professional drag racing since the mid-1960s and faced innumerable obstacles gaining entry into the boy’s club of the NHRA. Although not the first woman to race, she was the first to be licensed as a professional competitor and ran cars for the better part of nearly four decades, retiring only due to lack of sponsorship in 2003. Naturally, at the height of her career in the 70s / early 80s, her gender made excellent material for a biopic of her life, Heart like a Wheel (1983). And, perhaps just as naturally, the film does a pretty disappointing job of capturing the complexity of a woman who struggled to break the gender barrier in professional drag racing. 

Shirley Muldowney behind the wheel

Directed by Jonathan Kaplan and written by Ken Friedman, Heart like a Wheel hits the high points of Muldowney’s rise to prominence in the racing world: her beginnings as an amateur drag racer (which she did for extra money as a young, newly married waitress); her desire and ability to race professionally with the help of her first husband, mechanic Jack Muldowney, and son John; her divorce from Jack and relationship with fellow racer / crew boss Connie Kalitta; the failure of that relationship and, of course, the movie’s climax in which Muldowney beats Kalitta to take the NHRA U.S. Nationals championship in 1982. Heart like a Wheel has a certain B-movie quality to it, but garnered a 1984 Golden Globe nomination Best Performance by an Actress for Bonnie Bedelia, who plays Muldowney in the film. While not tremendously popular at the box office, it received favorable critical acclaim at film festivals and, among racing aficionados at least, still holds significant underground popularity.

Like most “women breaking barriers” films, especially those involving sports, Heart like a Wheel has a sort of against-all-odds feel to it that makes you want to like it, even if you know hokey story lines like that tend to be amped up by filmmakers for the benefit of paying audiences. This is no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that viewers are privy only to a watered-down version of the significant odds that Muldowney really faced. There are the typical sexist lines that a female drag racer could’ve expected to hear in a male-dominated sport (like when an announcer decries Muldowney receiving a kiss from her husband prior qualifying for her competition license ) and scenes that illustrate the roles Muldowney had to play as an hyper-sexualized novelty in order to do something she loved and was good at (including taking on the exotic name conferred on her by Connie Kalitta, “Cha Cha,” which she later rejected as a racing moniker). 

The “Cha Cha” version of Muldowney, 1972

Instead of developing important moments, like those in which she has trouble getting sponsorship because of her gender or struggles to make ends in the furious balance between a burgeoning racing career and a family, the film aims most of its dramatic focus on Muldowney’s romantic relationship with Kalitta.  In all of the drama of her seven-year fling with her hot-headed, womanizing guy, the lines and scenes that purport to represent the barriers Muldowney broke down seem pale and artificial, like they’ve been inserted only for the sake of occasionally reminding the viewer that Muldowney had to put up with a lot of macho crap in order to race.  

In all fairness, Muldowney and Kalitta’s relationship did have a significant impact on her career. They were involved professionally as well as personally, and her decision to cut him from her crew once the romance died made her even more of an underdog that she already was in the NHRA (since she couldn’t make it in racing without a bigger name than her own, apparently—or a man). In life and in the film, Muldowney took advantage of Kalitta’s license suspension (for fighting) and asked if she could race his top-fuel dragster with him as her crew chief, which put her on the road (literally) to three NHRA top-fuel championships. In fact, Kaplan and Friedman’s decision to organize the movie’s plot around Muldowney’s relationships with men is not unwarranted and lends an interesting masculine frame to a movie about a woman who came from and broke into, well, a masculine-framed world. From the opening black-and-white scene in which we see a young Shirley sitting on her father’s lap as he drives “too fast” down a deserted road through to the end when she shakes her fist in victory alongside her son / mechanic, this is a movie about a woman who lives in a world of men, is influenced by men, is supported and abandoned by men.

However, the male relationships that fostered Muldowney’s confidence and faith in her abilities hardly go noticed—especially the encouragement of her father.  One of the more touching scenes occurs in the first 10 minutes of the film, when a young Shirley Roque and her then beau Jack Muldowney approach her burly father to ask for permission to marry.  Tex Roque, a rough-and-tumble Country and Western singer, does not necessarily object to the marriage based on Shirley’s age—she’s sixteen—nor does he object to her choice of husband—he says that Jack is a really nice kid. What he objects to instead is that Shirley’s decision to marry so young will thwart her development as a self-sufficient woman. He advises her that “there’s not a man anywhere who’s worth giving up your ability to take care of yourself.”  Tex died fairly early in his daughter’s racing career, so perhaps there just wasn’t enough of a presence there to make it a bigger part of the film, but his advice – that Shirley take care of herself – doesn’t necessarily serve as the story arc that it seems set up to be.  Muldowney certainly gets things some things done herself: soliciting sponsorship, getting those needed signatures of support for her license application, and generally making it known that she would “mouth off” when she needed to.  But the crucial lesson for Shirley behind Tex’s advice gets lost in the development of her relationship with Kalitta, who is important in telling the Muldowney story, but who is certainly not the whole of it. 

Connie Kalitta (played by Beau Bridges) in Heart Like a Wheel

The relationship with Kalitta, of course, sets up the film’s narrative climax: the 1982 U.S. Nationals race in which Muldowney beat Kalitta to claim her third national title. They’d separated before the ’82 race, and the romance – in the film, but also to NHRA fans at the time—injects the duel with a provocative rivalry in which the little lady who can drive fast beats not just a male competitor, but a cheating, lying bastard.  It’s one of those convenient moments from Muldowney’s life story that make for a good Hollywood story, but the real victory there is overlooked by the film.  In 1982, no one had won three national NHRA titles and suddenly, someone had.  And it happened to be a woman. This achievement, though, is lost behind the drama of Muldowney beating a former lover who treated her badly and, by the film’s end, you wonder if Heart like a Wheel was really about a woman breaking into the male-dominated world of racing to begin with.

Maybe Heart like a Wheel is just a love story with fast cars in it—something for the boys and the girls in the Hollywood mindset. But the real story here is one about a woman who loved to drive and compete, inaugurated the participation of women in a sport decidedly “for boys,” and dealt with a mountain of complexity in the process (the usual accusations of being a bitch that go along with being an ambitious woman, the failure of her first marriage because of her racing career, and the emasculating threat a woman with a great ability posed to her male competitors). As someone who watched this movie over and over as a kid, and who could still watch it over and over as an adult, I can’t help but love Heart like a Wheel because I love Shirley. But I don’t love what Heart like a Wheel says about a woman who had a tough row and has served as a significant influence to those who follow in her footsteps– and what it doesn’t say about the challenges of women in a world dominated by men.