![]() Along with racing there are cheating wives, just the thing to spice up a race movie. A product of its day, the film tries pretty hard to combine a decent story with racing. :)Īs for story lines, another decent effort at a race movie is "Winning" with Paul Newman and his wife. She's also the critic who said that "Candy" would set back pornography a 100 years. Speaking of story lines, I remember when "LeMans" came out that one of the NBC "Today Show" film critics, Judith Crist, lambasted the movie and said words to the effect that "McQueen should have shot it on 8mm and shown it as home movies". There is some tear jerker moments for the sentimental. There is romance involved to keep the story line going on something other than race after race. The photography of Europe is great as are the race scenes. "Grand Prix" has an excellent cast of very well known (at the time) actors from the U.S. However, one can argue "LeMans" has just as good race photography and, again, I doubt if a movie like it can be made now. The reason I say "Grand Prix" is the best is that "LeMans" lacks a strong story line or its story line pales next to the action, whereas "Grand Prix"s story hangs in there fairly well. The quality of the DVD is a great improvement, especially on an HD TV, over the VHS copy I've owned for some time. ![]() The "How the Movie was Made" is worth a huge chunk of the selling price. Also, I doubt, due to safety concerns/insurance etc, that one can be made this way again. And I doubt one like it can ever be made again because this was done in the real world and, now, everyone (directors etc) will want to do one using computer graphics and it will not have the same feel of realism. ![]() Although it hasn't restored Mifune's voice, which was reportedly in the version shown at the film's premiere but subsequently replaced by Paul Frees on all prints (Adolfo Celi is also very obviously dubbed, possibly by Maximilian Schell), it does boast a good array of featurettes covering the making of the film and the Overture and Entr'acte from Maurice Jarre's excellent score have been retained. The film used every 65mm SuperPanavision camera then in existence, and thankfully the widescreen DVD transfer is a considerable improvement over the TV prints. Yet the cars remain the real stars, thanks to John Frankenheimer's constantly imaginative direction and his obvious enthusiasm for the material without ever losing himself in the minutiae as Steve McQueen did with Le Mans. But while top-billed Garner may be the nominal and not particularly sympathetic lead, it's Yves Montand's ageing champion gradually realizing the absurdity of what he does but unable to quit who makes the greatest impression: so much so that when Garner disappears for much of the last third of the movie you barely miss him. The plot itself may be simply a globe-trotting star-studded soap opera at heart - the roadshow equivalent of a doorstop bestseller - but it's a more than serviceable framework to hang the racing scenes on: after a spectacular crash in the Monte Carlo Grand Prix that cripples team mate Brian Bedford, James Garner's Formula One tries to work his way back on the circuit by racing for Toshiro Mifune's fledgling team while having an affair with Bedford's wife Jessica Walter. It's still a remarkably good looking film, too, not least because it was made at a time when the cars still looked like bullets rather than vacuum cleaners. The sequences have clearly been thought through and designed both emotionally as well as visually, with the great use of long lenses to establish scale and speed as cars drift in and out of focus giving the film a feel at once realistic and almost dreamlike (an impression further heightened in Saul Bass' almost balletic split-screen sequence). Yet throughout, unlike later films, you always have a clear idea of what is going on and what point the race scenes are trying to make. The crashes are there, along with the knowledge that that's what many in the crowd come for, but more than that, each race has a different character: more than just a different look, they're almost tone poems at times, one race from the driver's seat, another from a spectator's, another almost inside a character's head. The real danger is only underlined by the fact that so many of the professional drivers in the film died racing themselves (ten in the decade following the filming alone). It feels real because much of it is real, the actors (with the exception of Brian Bedford) doing much of the driving themselves, with the production even entering cars in real races to seamlessly match footage. The cars may be faster now, filming techniques improved and special effects more advanced, yet the film still has a truly epic scale and a feeling of veracity down to the last gear change that would be impossible to duplicate today. ![]() Forty years on, Grand Prix is still the best motor racing film ever made.
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