The “hard action film” Quentin Tarantino utterly adores: “That’s why he thanked me at the end”
Quentin Tarantino would credit most of Quentin Tarantino’s success to Quentin Tarantino, but he wouldn’t be the filmmaker he is if it weren’t for the cavalcade of low-rent B-movies, exploitation flicks, and genre-bending cult classics that shaped him into the auteur he’d become.
Although he’s always bristled at the notion of being called a ripoff merchant, it’s not untrue, to a certain extent. For the last three decades, he’s paid tribute to the films he grew up watching by hiring their stars, replicating shots, lifting lines of dialogue, and directly referencing them inside of his own universe.
Every single picture Tarantino has made has been indebted to a handful of features he’d seen and loved long before he stepped behind the camera to make his feature-length debut on Reservoir Dogs, some more obvious and pronounced than others. When it comes to Death Proof, the shadow of John Hough’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is inescapable.
The 1974 road thriller follows Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke as a pair of aspiring NASCAR racers who moonlight as thieves, and when they land a $150,000 windfall from holding a supermarket hostage before setting off to escape with Susan George in tow, they find themselves pursued by Vic Morrow’s dogged police officer.
In Death Proof, one of the license plates sported by Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike reads ‘938-DAN’, which is the same as the one on the car driven by Fonda in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and the villain directly references the movie. There are also several shots and backdrops that homage Hough’s high-speed thriller, and it was a badge of honour he was happy to wear.
“It was a hard action film, but I am happy to say that it’s one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films,” he told Film Talk. “Do you remember Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof? In the end credits, you’ll see, ‘Thanks to John Hough’. He shot on some of the locations as I did with Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and thought it was the first action film he had seen.”
“That’s why he thanked me at the end of it,” the filmmaker declared. “Because he based Death Proof on seeing that film.” He’s not wrong, but it’s not as if Tarantino’s half of the failed Grindhouse experiment was a remake, since there were countless other nods towards other movies, including Bullitt, The Vanishing, Thunder Alley, Soldier Blue, Paranoia, Convoy, Junior Bonner, and countless more.
It’s not like he’s the only person thanked in the credits, either, with the two-time Academy Award winner going all-out by dishing out ‘Special Thanks’ to everyone from Brian De Palma and Roger Corman to George Miller and Sam Peckinpah via Mickey Rourke and Dario Argento.
That said, if you’ve seen Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry before or after watching Death Proof, its influence is there for all to see. Tarantino is one of cinema’s most notorious magpies for a reason, and while it may not have been the driving force behind the throwback thriller, Hough’s cult classic left clearer fingerprints than most.
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