Grand Prix

John Frankenheimer’s long and ambitious Grand Prix is a bumpy thrill ride, nearly three hours of Formula One racing mixed with tepid and clichéd soap opera. When in the bedroom, it bores; when on the track, it roars.

The novel ways in which Grand Prix was shot make it the Ben-Hur chariot race for the 60’s, a life and death race to the finish. There are no discernible blue screen shots here; for such a top tier production, all stops were pulled and the car racing looks magnificent, with modified cameras attached to the cars, giving the Cinerama audiences the viewpoints of the drivers. On a wide-screen HDTV it looks amazing; in a wide-screen movie palace it must have been exhilarating.

James Garner, already long established as a film actor and the star of Maverick, plays American Pete Aron, a reckless driver who eventually works for the film’s surrogate for Soichiro Honda, Izo Yamura. Yamura is portrayed by the great actor Toshiro Mifune, mostly wasted here (his dialogue was dubbed by voice actor Paul Frees, whom I immediately and jarringly recognized).

Aron’s three competitors are Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand) an aging racer who’s grown weary of the sport; Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), injured in the film’s opening race and desperate to get back on the track; and Nino Barlini (Antonio Sabàto), young, brash and annoying. He may remind you of a more obnoxious young Marlon Brando.

Grand Prix, minus the intermission in the middle, is structured to feature races in various locales, alternating with off-track drama. The opening credit sequence and sections of other races are created with montages and multiple “screens,” the work of designer Saul Bass. It’s a very 60’s look, but was audacious and must have seemed very European (directer Ang Lee tried a similar split-screen look for his 2003 film The Hulk, to much less success). You can practically smell the oil and rubber tires in the scenes shot in the pit stops. Grand Prix also inserts famous Grand Prix drivers into the scenes whenever possible (they did much of the real driving). James Garner discovered a real and talented love for driving in this film, a talent he parlayed in his later TV show, The Rockford Files. Grand Prix also works as a time capsule, showing classic, beautifully designed cars against backdrops in which the crowds were frightfully close to the action. Those days are gone.

Actresses Jessica Walter and Eva Marie Saint are saddled with awful roles, though, as Scott’s motorsports-hating wife and Jean-Pierre’s love interest, respectively. The love stories, which feel forced into an otherwise exciting movie, don’t make any sense. Scott’s wife leaves him when he’s at his lowest—in a hospital bed and practically in a coma—then she promptly has an affair with another race car driver, Pete. Meanwhile, Eva Marie Saint’s reporter has little knowledge or interest in Formula One racing—and then has an embarrassing affair with the married Jean-Pierre Sarti. Ugh.

Grand Prix‘s screenwriter, Robert Alan Aurthur, had previously written for ’50s TV’s Playhouse 90 (for which John Frankenheimer also directed) and later produced and directed Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. Here he’s clearly under orders to write a “popular” script designed to appeal to both genders. MGM, which invested nine million dollars in its production (it only made seven million upon its release), was probably desperate for a sure-fire hit; the company was leaking money in the ’60s (it lost 35 million dollars in 1969 alone) and there was no way of knowing if the millions of dollars they were investing in renegade Stanley Kubrick’s production of 2001: A Space Odyssey would come to fruition. A soap opera/race car movie probably seemed a good bet.

For a completely different, but much more focused and thematically successful, John Frankenheimer film which also features spectacular car races and chases, I recommend his 1998 Ronin, starring Robert De Niro and co-written by David Mamet.

—Michael R. Neno, 2018 Apr 1
 

The two-DVD Warner Bros. set of Grand Prix is packed with extras, including four 40th anniversary documentaries and a 60’s featurette.