The Love Bug (1968)

Down-on-his-luck driver Jim Douglas acquires a Volkswagen Beetle with opinions, and the resulting ninety minutes concern racing, sabotage, and a car attempting to throw itself off the Golden Gate Bridge. That is the entire thesis. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It wants to show a small car outrunning a yellow Apollo GT, and it does so with the patience of a studio that knew its audience and respected them enough to leave them alone.

Carole Bennett works as a mechanic and sales associate, is good at both, and the screenplay never pauses to congratulate itself for this arrangement. Mr. Wu is a racing enthusiast and a businessman, which is how the film treats him, without annotation. Tennessee Steinmetz sculpts from discarded automobile parts and is simply an eccentric, not a diagnosis awaiting a label. The villain is British, wealthy, and defeated by a Volkswagen, which is a class observation of a very old and very unserious kind.

The picture arrives from a moment when Disney could put a sentient car on screen and ask nothing of the audience beyond attention. There is no sermon here, no instruction, no scene in which the characters turn to face us and explain how we ought to live. The moral universe extends only to the proposition that cruelty to a Beetle will be repaid, and Thorndyke's comeuppance is a job in the mechanics' workshop alongside his accomplice. We searched for cultural signposts and found a toll booth. Every marker sits at zero, and the film seems entirely at peace with that.