Speed (movie)

So, before the bomb can be addressed, the bus must desperately maneuver throughout the city, unable to slow down for anything with an inexperienced driver until it could be directed to an clear area. Howard Hawks, Storyteller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The difference with this film is that the bus initially runs the immediate risk of collisions in a congested traffic area that would have fatally stopped and/or slowed it down and triggered the bomb. Mast, Gerald. In 1965 the first episode of Thunderbirds, "Trapped in the Sky," had a supersonic airliner threatened with a bomb in its landing gear and the occupants are threatened by radiation poisoning by the craft's power source overwhelming its ablative shielding in hours; in Rod Serling's 1966 TV-movie The Doomsday Flight, Edmond O'Brien's bomb would detonate if the airliner descended below 5,000 feet (1500 m); and in the 1975 Japanese movie Crisis Express109 (Shinkansen Daibakuha) (shown in English as The Bullet Train), starring Sonny Chiba, a Shinkansen train will be destroyed if its speed drops below 80 km/h. The film preserves the book's title, and the names and characteristics of some of the characters, but nothing from beyond the first fifth of the volume. The basic premise of extortion using a bomb that will trigger automatically if a vehicle tries to stop unless a ransom is paid was not original to this movie. Although Hawks had a high regard for Hemingway's works in general, he considered To Have and Have Not his worst book, a "bunch of junk".

An additional parody can be seen in the Leslie Nielsen movie Spy Hard, featuring bus driver Ray Charles. He also wrote the two other songs in the movie. A further ironic use of the "Speed" theme came with "Speed for Thespians," an Academy Award-nominated short film, where a group of actors attempt to play out Chekhov's "The Bear" on a New York City bus. Hoagy plays the piano player, Cricket, who is actually composing that song. The Speed movies were parodied by the Father Ted episode "Speed 3", in which Father Dougal McGuire is trapped on a milk float with a bomb that will detonate if the float goes slower than 4 mi/h (6.4 km/h). In the movie, Bacall sings "How Little We Know" by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. The sequel was a critical and commercial flop. The film is most remembered for the onscreen chemistry between Steve and Slim, and Slim's erotic insolence, epitomized when she reminds Steve "You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together, and blow." The chemistry continued offscreen, causing Bogart's divorce and subsequent marriage to Bacall; they would later play opposite one another in The Big Sleep and other films.

Willem Dafoe played the villain. It was her first film, at the age of 20. Only Sandra Bullock returned to reprise her role. Harry ends up working for the French Resistance and falls for a pickpocket, "Slim," played by Lauren Bacall. There is a sequel, Speed 2: Cruise Control, which is set on a cruise ship. This similarity was noted when the film was first released. That scene, as well as much of the movie, were all filmed on California's Interstate 105. In this and other ways the film is reminiscent of Michael Curtiz's Casablanca.

One of the movie's most famous scenes involved the bus having to jump over a gap in an elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp which was still under construction. In this exotic location, a world-weary character (Harry Morgan, or Steve) played by Humphrey Bogart is urged to do the right thing politically. The cop and a young woman (Bullock) struggle to keep the bus moving at an acceptable speed despite the congested traffic of the city, while local police provide escort, clear traffic, plan the best route for the bus, and search for the bomber. The 1944 film version, directed by Howard Hawks, moved the story's setting from Key West to Martinique under the Vichy regime. The bomb has multiple triggers, including one that will detonate if the bus goes slower than 50 mi/h (80 km/h). To Have and Have Not (1944), is a film directed by Howard Hawks that is nominally based on the novel To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. Written by Graham Yost, the story is about an Los Angeles police officer (Reeves) who has to stop a insane bomber/extortionist (Hopper) who has rigged a bomb on a public transit bus (a City of Santa Monica Big Blue Bus).

Speed is a 1994 film directed by Jan de Bont, starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock (her breakout role), and Dennis Hopper.