Tag: Melissa Richard

Women in Sports Week: Blast from the Past: Jonathan Kaplan’s ‘Heart Like a Wheel’

DVD cover of Heart Like a Wheel

This guest post by Melissa Richard previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 29th, 2012.

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.

Bonnie Bedelia as Shirley Muldowney in Heart Like a 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). 

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.

Movie still from Heart Like a Wheel, starring Bonnie Bedelia and Beau Bridges

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.

Heart Like a Wheel film still

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.

Melissa Richard is a part-time English instructor at High Point University in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. She writes about nineteenth-century factory girls in British literature and culture, likes to take photographs of things and stuff, and thinks that dancing is really fun. 

Travel Films Week: Protecting Olive in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’

Movie poster for Little Miss Sunshine
This is a guest review by Melissa Richard.
Look around… this place is fucked! I don’t want these people judging Olive—fuck them! You’re the mom—you’re supposed to protect her! Everyone is gonna laugh at her, Mom… please don’t let her do this. Look, she’s not a beauty queen. She’s just not.

So says Dwayne to his mother Sheryl moments before his sister Olive hits the stage for the talent portion of the pageant that gives Little Miss Sunshine its title. Olive and Little Miss Sunshine are who and what pile the extended Hoover family into a yellow VW van and carry them across 800 miles from New Mexico to California. In the process, the Hoovers lose dreams and careers, gear clutches and horn capabilities, not to mention the heroin-snorting Grandpa. Dwayne’s outburst comes at the near-end of a trip filled with heartache and disappointment (often simultaneously gut-wrenching and hilarious), and not only because he recognizes the damage participating in the contest might cause to his younger sister. He also expresses the collective fear of the male Hoovers who have generally, through their own failures, come to see (and protect) Olive as a symbol of personal redemption.
Sheryl checking in with Olive before her talent act, with Richard and Dwayne looking on
Little Miss Sunshine is like many classic road trip films in that the trip itself is a vehicle (pun intended) for the characters to learn something about one another, about themselves, and/or to come to a kind of acceptance of one another, and of themselves, by the film’s end. And Little Miss Sunshine’s characters certainly have a lot to learn because, like most of us, they are deeply and, in some cases tragically, flawed.

Olive’s dad Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) is a failing motivational speaker (a complete contradiction); brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is in teenage-boy training to become a jet pilot (which later goes down the tubes when it’s discovered that he’s colorblind); Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), the “number one highly-regarded Proust scholar” in America, is recovering from an attempted suicide after his love interest, a graduate student, dumps him for the “number two highly-regarded Proust scholar” in America; Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) is a heroin addict who’s been kicked out of his retirement community and has an abiding love of women, porn, and Rick James (and has, possibly, a knack for choreography); and then there’s mom Sheryl (Toni Collette), whose only major flaw seems to be furtively smoking cigarettes (and possibly marrying a failed motivational speaker). Olive (Abigail Breslin) and the pageant represent the movement toward something better, something successful (by literally moving toward the land of sunshine, California), even when it’s clear to everyone that Olive is just not a beauty queen, as Dwayne says. It’s not that she is a real contender that drives the Hoovers toward redemption. It’s the symbolic value of her possible success in the type of contest that society sanctions as a visible indicator of success (however troubling or, well, foolish a beauty contest is as an indicator of success for young girls and women). In other versions of these contests—careers, dreams of careers—Richard, Frank, and Dwayne, in particular, have failed.

Olive as a symbol of redemption (and the need to protect her as such) is established early in the film, when the frazzled Sheryl arrives home with Frank, and the family sits down to a working-mom meal of a bucket of fried chicken, salad, and Sprite Zero. Everyone else seems suited (or apathetic) enough to ignore the bandages on Frank’s wrists, but not Olive. She looks at Frank, gasps, and exclaims, “What happened to your arms?” Richard changes the subject to Olive’s pageant dance routine, but Frank interrupts, saying he’s had an accident and shifts the conversation to Dwayne’s vow of silence. Olive, however, insists. Frank says it’s “okay” to talk about it, which leads Sheryl to indicate that she’s “okay” with talking about it (she’s “pro-honesty”) if Frank is. After Frank permits Sheryl to tell Olive that he attempted suicide, which she does, Richard flips, suggests that it’s not an appropriate conversation to have at dinner, and “shushes” Olive. She’s nonplussed, however, and poignantly asks why Frank would want to kill himself.

Richard explaining to Olive why Uncle Frank may be a loser, but she’s going to be a winner, in the dinner scene
Professional pusher of motivational success that he is, Richard is having none of it. After listening to Frank’s building tale of unrequited love and academic failure, he spins the story into his own type of motivational-speak, interpreting Frank’s narrative as a series of “foolish choices” and “giving up on himself” for Olive. On the one hand, the interpretation is a way—albeit a clumsy, ineffective, and completely ridiculous one—to package the “why” of an attempted suicide to a seven-year-old. On the other hand, it’s a clear reflection of the underlying fear of failure that Richard himself is facing in the attempted sell of his “Refuse to Lose / 9 Steps” program (which does, indeed, fail). Richard may not realize this consciously, but as he spins Olive’s desire to compete into a similar “winner or loser” narrative to that of Frank’s, the family, as well as the audience, does—especially since the Hoovers can hardly afford to take the trip. Green-lighting the road trip is Richard’s way of explicitly protecting Olive’s dream and implicitly protecting his own.

The reasons for the Hoovers to protect Olive are not always as selfish as those that Richard might have for protecting her (and, on occasion, they have to protect Olive from her father’s philosophy). In fact, the literal protection of Olive from the social pressures that break us down as adults is often incredibly touching, as it is in the diner scene wherein Olive orders her waffles “a la mode-ee.” Although Sheryl questions Olive’s choice of ice cream on the grounds of it being so early in the morning, Richard objects because he’s still got his eye on her success (as a beauty queen specifically, but replace the pageant with anything else and he’d likely have a similar objection). He breaks into a patronizing lesson on how ice cream comes from cream, which comes from cows, and notes that “cream has a lot of fat in it.” Sheryl, bless her, knows where he’s going with this and mutters under her breath “Richh-eerd.” As usual, Richard turns Sheryl’s earlier “pro-honesty” defense of telling Olive about Frank’s suicide attempt against her (“she’s gonna find out anyway”). When Olive asks what she might find out, Richard replies, “Well, when you eat ice cream, the fat in the ice cream becomes fat in the body.”

The Hoovers at their first pit stop on the road, looking totally enthused as Richard explains to Olive how cream makes you fat
To her credit—and displaying the role she plays in the protection of her daughter—Sheryl looks at Olive and says, “I just want you to understand that it’s okay to be skinny and it’s okay to be fat, if that’s what you wanna be. Whatever you want, it’s okay.” While Olive is processing this, Richard asks Olive to consider whether beauty queens are “skinny or fat,” to which she quietly replies “They’re skinny, I guess.” And Sheryl shoots Richard a death-ray stare as the waitress comes over and serves Olive her “a la mode-ee” side dish.

“Does anyone want my ice cream?” Olive sadly asks.

Grandpa to the rescue. “Yeah, I’d like a little…” he says, and then he invites everyone else to have some, as well, until Olive protests “Wait! Stop! Don’t eat it all…” and digs in. (And Sheryl cuts Richard’s attempted interruption of this as Dwayne shoots a spitball through a straw directly into Richard’s face.) Taking their cue from Sheryl, Grandpa, Dwayne, and Frank are not only protecting Olive’s desire to eat ice cream; they are ultimately protecting her right to make her own choices and to disregard what society (a patriarchal society represented by Richard, maybe?) tells her to choose.

This particular scene foreshadows the protection the Hoover men give Olive during her dance performance during the talent portion of Little Miss Sunshine. Having made it to California and only losing one person (poor Grandpa), the Hoovers have everything invested in Olive, including the emotional toll their own failures have taken on them. Olive’s routine to Rick James’ “Super Freak,” choreographed by the recently departed Grandpa, is the film’s true highlight because it does so much in a few minutes: it makes explicit the sexualized undertones of the child glitz pageant world (Olive might be shaking her bootie and doing the ever-lovable “growl crawl,” but the little dolls in their make-up and teased hair represent something similar on a different frequency); it provides the context through which the Hoovers are able to pull together and to accept themselves as they are; but it also provides the moment when Richard, as well as Frank and Dwayne, are really able to protect Olive for who she is and what she’s chosen. With the head pageant judge in a tizzy over the routine, Richard jumps on stage to protect Olive from being pulled off, but instead of quietly suggesting to his daughter that it’s time to go, he begins dancing with her (and is joined by the rest of the Hoovers in quick succession).

Frank, Richard, and Dwayne rockin’ out on stage with Olive
The Hoover boys may not like what the pageant represents, which they become clearly aware of once they arrive, and it’s not about protecting Olive as a symbol anymore. It’s about representing her choice to be in the pageant, whether she’s truly a contender or not.

Which brings me back to the quotation from Dwayne I opened with.

Dwayne and Richard are now mentally awake enough to be concerned about Olive competing in the show; they’ve now seen the polished contestants strut and pose for the judges, and they know she’s not made of that stuff. As Dwayne points out, she’s just not. At first flustered by the sudden concern toward Olive, Sheryl finally explains to them: 

Olive is who she is. She has worked so hard, she’s poured everything into this. We can’t just take it away from her—we can’t! I know you wanna protect her… but we gotta let Olive be Olive. 

Like in the diner scene when she tells Olive she can be skinny or fat or whatever she wants to be, Sheryl has been protecting Olive all along—not because she herself is missing something, not because she’s failed personally, but because she recognizes the importance of a little girl being able to be, well, who she is. Sheryl isn’t your typical pageant mom… she’s not a “pageant mom” at all. She’s far removed from those types of moms you see on shows like TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, women who put out big bucks for high-teased hair pieces, spray tans, and “flippers” that transform mere babies into miniature adult likenesses, who act out routines for their daughters to follow from the audience, who train, coach, and, sometimes quite literally, push these girls toward the stage. In fact, Sheryl is clearly removed from the process in a positive sense: from the moment she hears the phone message from her sister, Cindy, indicating that Olive is eligible to compete in Little Miss Sunshine (and rolls her eyes at the revelation that the first-place winner set to compete was disqualified because of “diet pills or something”), Sheryl is proud and supportive of Olive no matter what. She’s not pushy, but she’s not disconnected, either. She is being what Dwayne reminds her she is—“the mom”—by allowing Olive the freedom of her own choices.

Letting “Olive be Olive”—and learning to protect the choice Olive can make to be herself—is ultimately what allows the Hoovers to accept themselves and one another. We don’t know what life will be like for the Hoovers once they return to New Mexico, but one thing is for certain by the film’s end: they’ve broken through a lot more than the barrier gate in the parking lot of the Redondo Beach Inn.

Melissa Richard is a part-time English instructor at High Point University in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. She writes about work and women in nineteenth-century Britain (as well as less esoteric topics), likes to take photographs of things and stuff, and thinks that dancing is really fun.



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

Heart Like a Wheel (1983)

This is a guest post from Melissa Richard.

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.


Melissa Richard is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a part-time English instructor at High Point University in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. She writes about nineteenth-century factory girls in British literature and culture, likes to take photographs of things and stuff, and thinks that dancing is really fun.