“The Daredevil Drivers”

Northern Advocate, 18 March 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

“The Daredevil Drivers”

Automobile accidents will be the death of you sooner or later, .judging from the mounting highway death tolls of recent years, but in Hollywood, where everything is different, there still are people living, making an excellent living in fact, crashing cars. For instance, they have just finished a road epic called “The Daredevil Drivers.” In the film, Director Breezy Eason had 11 passenger cars and four buses smashed all over the landscape. All those mishaps may sound like an ill wind to some folk, but it makes this a boom year for Johnny Dickels and Fred Hunter, ace car-smashers of the film lots. ,

It takes all kinds of people to make a world, as some one has pointed but, and the Messrs Dickels and Hunter have found that their lot on earth is to make automobile accidents an. art, a highly skilful art, and a highly profitable one, too. In “The Daredevil Drivers,” they did all the daredevil driving called for in the roles of Dick Purcell, Charlie Foy, Willard Parker and Gordon Oliver, the men who will be featured on the screen.

A pretty job of wrecking Dickels and Hunter did. In one scene they cracked a touring sedan into a big bus head on. In another they slewed a car around a sharp curve at'7o miles an hour, pretended to lose control, and rolled it over three times into a field.

They arranged a neat little crack-up of two cars side crashing each other and turning over. In fact, they did everything except somersault their mounts on skiis for the edification of the watching movie men. Then they washed their hands and went home without a scratch on either of them.

Dickels and Hunter insist their job is routine, with their chances of getting hurt far less than those run by the average Sunday afternoon freewheeler.

Both expert mathematicians, they figure out everything in advance. They say that by an application of the laws of gravitation, acceleration and angles, they know just what will happen when they hit or turn something, how far they will roll, which side will be up when they halt, and where their bodies will be found when the crackup has been recorded. That’s their story, and most of Hollywood is willing to let them have it.