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1980's Used Cars makes us wish that Robert Zemeckis had directed every T&A comedy of the period. Opening with his signature touching-down-from-the-heavens crane shot, Used Cars boasts of the fluid cinematography (Zemeckis is the premier Spielberg protégé because his camerawork is shrewd like Spielberg's) and terrific editing we've come to expect from Zemeckis, but it's impressive here for the low budget of the production, Zemeckis' inexperience as a director, and the genre to which Used Cars belongs, whose entries usually coast on their jokes and their nudity.

Which is not to otherwise lump Used Cars in with a Hardbodies or a Private School: the often-ingenious screenplay by Zemeckis and Bob Gale (who would go on to write Back to the Future together) keeps its dirty gags on a leash. Kurt Russell stars as Rudy Russo, a resourceful used car salesman with political aspirations. (Zemeckis or Gale says--quite rightly--within the supplementary material of the Used Cars DVD that we don't turn on the despicable Rudy because he's good at his job--one of Hitchcock's axioms.) After promising Rudy the $10,000 he needs to enter into the senate race, boss Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden) has a fatal heart attack, one incited by the scheming of his irredeemable brother Roy (Warden again, his dual casting predicting a motif of the Back to the Future sequels), who owns the car lot across the street.

Rudy, left both minding the store and desperate for cash, declares war on Roy's dealership, happening upon an X-rated promotional campaign that can't miss and doesn't. A habitual liar who finds himself fibbing to Luke's own daughter (the appealing Deborah Harmon) about her father's disappearance, Rudy weaves a tapestry of half-truths that threatens to split apart at the seams in the film's climax, one of Zemeckis-Gale's trademark spectacles of parallel action and idiosyncratic payoffs. It's also one hell of a vehicular orgy, distinguishing itself in the era of Hal Needham and Cannonball Run by virtue of having a motive. Used Cars skewers the American Dream with such pizzazz.

1.85:1 DVD capture: Kurt Russell in Used Cars

On DVD, Used Cars is further enriched by screen-specific group commentary from Russell, Zemeckis, and Gale. I hereby order Russell to participate in every future yak-track for his films: his laughter is so warm, frequent, and infectious that one contracts sympathetic nostalgia. The three of them have a sustained blast watching Used Cars again twenty-one years later, with Zemeckis and Gale relating their inspiration for the story and certain characters, having some chuckles at Spielberg's expense (they reveal that the big boy scout was offended by the scripted line "The President lies!"), and getting wistful over the pre-CGI days of "pure cinema." This is easily the most enjoyable commentary I've heard in ages.

The disc also contains a vintage commercial for an Arizona Chrysler dealership guest-starring Russell, a 4-minute block of deleted scenes and flubbed lines (under "outtakes"), eight radio spots (including a lengthy interview with Russell from "Mid-Day with Dave Avalos," in which he calls his Disney period a career "lowlight" and then back-pedals furiously), a circuitous "Vintage Advertising Gallery" of production stills and poster art, trailers for So I Married an Axe Murderer, Multiplicity, and Groundhog Day, and select filmographies. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of Used Cars itself is, barring a few workprint-quality inserts, stunning and age-belying. I challenge you to find a better-looking DVD of a film from the very early eighties. The sound is the original mono mix spread over two channels, and it is satisfactory.-Bill Chambers