Joe is a thoroughly square, honest, and upstanding race car driver who has a rivalry on and off the track with an asshole racer named Snake. Something of a love triangle breaks out between the two when Snake’s best gal Ruby starts making a play for Joe. Joe’s in hot water though on account of him getting mixed up with some gangsters who trick him into unwittingly riding along on a heist, which results in the death of a nightwatchman. Naturally, it all comes to a head at the big stock car race.
White Lightnin’ Road is a good old-fashioned Hicksploitation melodrama courtesy of Ron Ormond, director of Mesa of Lost Women. It features fast cars, loose women, and country crackers. What more can one ask for from the genre?
What separates White Lightnin’ Road from the rest of the pack are the racing scenes. They are genuinely entertaining, and dare I say, exciting. Ormond (who also has a supporting role as the head gangster “Slick”) gets a lot of mileage (no pun intended) out of these sequences, which is a good thing because rest of the plot is a bit all over the place.
Yes, there’s probably a few too many characters and unnecessary subplots, but a few of the detours are amusing. I especially liked the part where Ruby’s father catches Snake messing around with her and instigates an impromptu shotgun wedding. It helps that Arline Hunter is spectacularly easy on the eyes as the southern sexpot Ruby. She comes off like a white trash Marilyn Monroe and her seductive scenes give the movie a shot in the arm whenever it goes off the track (pun intended.) In fact, her best scene occurs in the third act during the big race when someone says an unkind word about her man, which leads to a blouse-ripping catfight in the grandstands. The action is so fast and furious that it manages to overshadow the action on the track, which is really saying something.
In short, White Lightnin’ Road is sure to get your engine revving.
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