The first of two films that James Caan would make with legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks—they collaborated on El Dorado a year later—was also the actor’s first lead movie role. Hawks’s return to the car-racing world (The Crowd Roars) is an episodic, action-packed story about professional and sexual conflicts among a group of young race car drivers. NASCAR driver Larry Frank assisted Hawks with the movie by allowing the film crew to mount cameras on his car. “The young James Caan, in his first leading role, brings something new to the Hawksian universe: a compressed, combustible neurosis, embedded in a Method-juiced bundle of tics and involutions.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker.