Grab your popcorn and Milk Duds. You want it? We’re gonna give it to you—straight from the gearbox! Here’s the 1949 racing classic, The Big Wheel, in its entirety. 

Some car guys say Grand Prix is the best auto racing movie ever made. Others say Steve McQueen’s opus LeMans is the tops. You may hear a few votes for To Please a Lady or even Days of Thunder. 

Well, they’re all full of baloney. Honestly. The best racing film in the history of the universe is The Big Wheel starring Mickey Rooney, Thomas Mitchell, and Mary Hatcher. The matter is not open to debate.

“But MCG,” I hear you say. “The Big Wheel is nothing but cornball. It’s a predictable cornball story full of stock Hollywood cornball characters spouting cornball dialogue from beginning to end. The racing scenes are pure cornball, and there are not one but two romantic subplots that are totally cornball as well. Cornball cornball cornball.”

Yes, exactly. It’s cornball. And that’s what makes it so great. If Norman Rockwell directed an Andy Hardy movie about midget racing, it would be The Big Wheel. This film expresses everything we would like the world to be. Unlike, oh, say, Sylvester Stallone’s Driven, which treats the human condition as a kind of disease, The Big Wheel celebrates life and living.

So while Driven was not only the worst racing movie ever made, it’s one of the worst movies ever made in any genre. But The Big Wheel was watchable, entertaining, and worth 88 minutes of our time in 1949. And it remains so today.

The Big Wheel’s story is built around Southern California midget racing in the late ’40s and the 1949 Indianapolis 500 (Bill Holland still wins, you’ll be relieved to hear.)  The period racing footage is great. But what the movie is really about,  from the first cornball scene to the last, is American idealism—in full mid-20th century flower. Watch it, and see if you don’t feel better afterward. Take it easy around the curves.