My World of Flops, Race Jam Case File #190 Let it Ride (1989)

Joe Pykta has a perplexing resume. He’s directed lots of Pepsi commercials and Michael Jackson videos as well as any number of shorts of various kinds but the eighty-two year old master of adverts and music videos has only directed two narrative feature films. 

The better known of Pykta’s two feature films is very directly an extension of his career as a hotshot, much in demand director of videos and commercials. You could even say that 1996’s Space Jam was an 88 minute, 80 million dollar commercial for Nike and Michael Jordan’s brands. 

Pykta certainly did not stop directing movies because Space Jam was not successful. The iconic blockbuster made over a billion dollars in merchandising money and a quarter billion at the box-office. 

That is good. Very good. Space Jam may have been a soulless abomination and an insult to Looney Tunes but it took up so much space culturally that twenty-five years after Space Jam’s release Warner Brothers spent one hundred and fifty million dollars to make a sequel (Space Jam: a New Legacy) that, if reviews are to be believed, somehow manages to be worse and more mercenary than its predecessor. 

But before the king of commercials could make pop culture history of the shittiest kind he made his directorial debut with a perversely non-commercial little movie that feels more analogous to the outsider cinema of the 1970s than Pykta’s big hit. 

I’ve had my eye on 1989’s Let it Ride for literally decades due to its unusual creative team. In addition to being directed by a man whose only other feature film is Space Jam, the flop was written by Nancy Dowd, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Slap Shot, Coming Home and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains from Good Vibes, a novel by Jay Cronley, a writer whose fiction previously inspired the terrific sleepers Funny Farm and Quick Change. 

If that’s not impressive enough, the movie was co-edited by Dede Allen, whose credits include The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, Slap Shot and Dog Day Afternoon. 

Despite all of the talent onboard, it’s not surprising that Let it Ride was a critical and commercial flop that cost nearly twenty million dollars to make, despite taking place pretty much entirely at a race track, grossed just under five million dollars. 

As a purposefully modest little movie about a small time loser on an unexpected winning streak Let it Ride was decidedly out of step with the bigger is better ethos of the 1990s. 

Richard Dreyfuss stars as Jay Trotter, a taxi driver who is a loser in life and a loser at the track. His gambling problem has nearly cost him his relationship with long-suffering wife Pam (Teri Garr), who is willing to give their marriage one last chance as long as he agrees to work on his many vices. 

But Jay is an addict so he cannot help himself, particularly when his lifelong losing streak gives way to a hot streak so intense and lucrative that the entire race track is locked into it. 

Jay’s unexpected, uncharacteristic surge of good luck affects the vixens of the track on a hormonal level. Beauties who would otherwise not give the diminutive everyman a second glance suddenly find themselves ferociously attracted to him. 

Jennifer Tilly and her hypnotic cleavage steal scenes as Vicki, a sex bomb in a tiny mini-dress that just barely covers her nipples, particularly when she gets excited, which is often. 

The suspense in Let it Ride consequently comes as much from whether or not Tilly’s heaving bosoms will realize their glorious destiny and break free of their flimsy cloth prison as it does from whether our hero’s winning streak will end. 

Vicki is a gold digger in a relationship of convenience with much older sugar daddy Greenberg (Alan Garfield) who begins lusting after the nebbishy middle-aged schmuck when his luck with the horses transforms him from a zero to a hero. 

Being a winner for once in his cockamamie life renders Jay ten times more attractive to gorgeous women than he would be otherwise, including Mrs. Davis (Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas), a middle-aged seductress who develops a thing for Jay when his aura turns money green. 

Women aren’t the only ones who feel differently about Jay once he starts making serious money. When Jay first approaches a track employee played by the great Robbie Coltrane he looks at him like something that he might scrape off his shoe, then hurl distastefully into the trash. 

But every victory and payday causes Jay to rise in the man’s estimation until he is hailing him as a veritable god among men, a racetrack legend he will tell his kids and grandkids about. Coltrane’s character doesn’t even have a proper name or much in the way of screen time but he doesn’t need them to create an indelible impression all the same. 

The massive Brit and future fixture of the Harry Potter motion pictures is one of a number of heavyweight character actors having an absolute ball playing real characters. But the film’s most important character might just be the racetrack itself. 

The race track where Jay finds salvation is a universe onto itself with its own history, culture and set of rules,  written and otherwise. It’s a desperate, sad place for desperate, sad people but it’s also a whole lot of fun when you’re winning and the whole world becomes an endless series of green lights and irresistible invitations. 

In an assured directorial debut that seemed to promise bigger and better things, Pykta captures the manic excitement of a historic winning spree, the live-wire electricity that comes with being on the kind of roll that can change your life. 

Let it Ride might have had more of a satirical or sociological edge if it were directed by someone like George Roy Hill or Michael Ritchie but Pykta has created a genuinely funny, gloriously lived-in little sleeper full of novelistic details, a movie about people and their glorious idiosyncrasies.

As a semi-obscure critical and commercial flop with nothing in the way of a cult following, Let it Ride may not be the safest bet for movie lovers looking for an enjoyable day at the races but I found it to be a winner. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success 

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