The motion picture and automobile industries developed along parallel timelines, making movies about cars and their drivers an inevitability. Some of the first subjects printed to celluloid involved charismatic speed demons and the open road, a subject that only grew in popularity as autos outpaced public transportation in the years leading up to the Second World War. Daredevil Drivers (1938) went into production in December 1937 under the working title Highway Pirates, leading one to expect a tale of interstate hijacking; instead, this First National release concerns a not-so-friendly rivalry between competing municipal bus companies, a dispute that only intensifies with the intercession of a disgraced race car driver (Dick Purcell, later a leading man for Poverty Row's Monogram Pictures), who falls for the lady owner (Beverly Roberts) of one of the firms. Author of the film's original story, Charles R. Condon had previously written the racetrack drama Ten Laps to Go (1936) and not one but two films about speedboat racing while director B. Reeves Easton had slightly over a decade earlier overseen the chariot race scene for Fred Niblo's Biblical epic Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). Worth mentioning among Daredevil Drivers' supporting cast is third-billed Gloria Blondell (kid sister of Warner Brothers staple Joan Blondell, and later the voice of Disney's Daisy Duck), William Hopper (son of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and later one of the stars of the long-running Perry Mason series) and Charley Foy, one of vaudeville's celebrated child performers The Seven Little Foys.

By Richard Harland Smith