The Pace That Kills (1928)
** (out of 4)
Country boy Eddie (Owen Gorin) is a great guy. He's a hard worker on his family's farm. He is loved by his mother as well as his sweetheart who he plans to marry. The only problem is that his young sister has ran off to the evil city so Eddie must go there and try to find her. Soon he meets Fannie (Virginia Roye) at his job and she introduces him to some "headache medicine" and before long they're raging addicts.
This here was producer Willis Kent's first film and it's basically a melodrama about the downfall of drug addiction. The producer would follow this film up with a number of low-budget Westerns and in 1935 he'd remake this as THE COCAINE FIENDS. The producer would then fully hit the exploitation market with movies like MAD YOUTH, CONFESSIONS OF A VICE BARON and TOO HOT TO HANDLE. Overtime this film has become known as the first drug exploitation movie but it's not really that.
For the most part this here is a pretty straight drama. Those expecting anything like the remake or the craziness of films like REEFER MADNESS will be disappointed because it's not like that. The drug addiction that is shown in the movie is done so in a more realistic way and the main focus is on the love story between these two people who start to fall further and further into darkness. The first eleven-minutes try way too hard to show what a great guy Eddie is and his "downfall" happens at the flick of an eye.
I actually thought both Goris and Roye were good in their roles. Neither one of them overact and for the most part they're quite believable. I think the film's biggest problem is that it just doesn't come across as a movie from 1928. It really seems to have been influenced by the various D.W. Griffith mortality films from 1909-1913. Still, THE PACE THAT KILLS is an interesting movie and fans of the drug sub-genre should enjoy it.
