The town sheriff's ne'er-do-well son, a jug-eared redhead, swipes the winning Mustang from a stock-car racetrack -- simply to appease the whim of an All-American blonde bitch in white hotpants and knee-high boots -- and takes off on a day-long joyride with a Keystone Kop posse in hot pursuit. Charles B. Griffith, a veteran scriptwriter for Roger Corman (Bucket of Blood, Wild Angels), is given a rare chance to direct, for Corman's New World company, and he doesn't muff it. A throwback slapstick comedy, Eat My Dust is closer in spirit to Mack Sennett than it is to contemporary car-craze movies. And as in a Sennett or a Looney Tune chase movie, the continual exaggeration serves to distance, or cushion, the amoral violence. In the writing, Griffith creates a voluble Preston Sturges cast of characters: a deputy sheriff with a Harvard vocabulary, a Chinese attorney with a Southern drawl, an addled accident victim talking total gibberish (as he is ushered by the elbow into the police station: "I prefer the smell of a bakery"). More surprising, Griffith shows, in the directing, a real flair, Tati-esque or Tashlin-esque, for comedy timing and comedy camera placement. Very American in its iconography (the garish stock cars, the young hero's Civil War cap, the ubiquitous jack o' lanterns), the movie is also very American in its conception of stunted sexual growth: In one afternoon, the adolescent naif progresses from juvenile-gang camaraderie, to flirtation and disillusionment with his Miss Teenage Tease, to a final stage of lonely, self-fulfilling professionalism. Starring Ron Howard and Christopher Norris. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd