Grand Prix (1966)

directed by John Frankenheimer
Frames in this review are taken from the two-disc Warner Brothers DVD, released in July 2006.

Jump to section: Racing and Technical

As the showpiece film for Formula One, Grand Prix is a cult favorite in the racing community. In online forums people have griped about how long it took to make it to DVD, salivated at the historical racetracks that no longer exist, and marveled at the pioneering race footage that would anticipate today's in-car television coverage. Yet despite its niche position in the market, the film is actually very accessible, and informative even to someone whose only contact with racing comes from television while channel-surfing. In a way, Grand Prix is the best Arthur Hailey film ever made, even though it's not based on an Arthur Hailey novel. It brings in a Grand Hotel-esque cast of characters, spins them around in a blender, and spits them all out into a spectacular climax. And, unlike that stillborn Arthur Hailey 70mm spectacle Airport, Grand Prix needs no artificial action — the expert camera work and careful editing give the live-action racing sequences a thrill impossible to achieve with special effects.

The film opens with the Monaco Grand Prix in the streets of Monte Carlo. An accident propels driver Pete Aron (James Garner) into the harbor and seriously injures teammate Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford). Aron finds himself persona non grata and is kicked off the team. Nor is he welcome at his former team of Ferrari, so he does what many washed-up sports stars do — become a television sportscaster. While Aron is on the sidelines, Ferrari driver Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand) is racking up victory after victory and wooing American fashion magazine writer Louise Frederickson (Eva Marie Saint), while his young teammate Nino Barlini (Antonio Sabato) is living the sixties life of sex and rock-and-roll, the former with Lisa (French singing sensation Françoise Hardy). But all hope is not lost for our protagonist, as Japanese magnate Izo Yamura (Toshiro Mifune) enters the scene and offers a job to Aron. (He was a lousy sportscaster anyway.)

With all the main characters in place, the film settles into the standard plot, following the racing community on and off the course. Stoddard painfully recovers from his injury and, obsessed with equaling his elder brother's championship record, gets back onto the circuit while popping painkillers. Off the course, Stoddard's relationship with Aron becomes even icier when his estranged wife Pat (Jessica Walter) starts sleeping with Aron and modeling for Louise's magazine. Meanwhile, Barlini moves to the top and Sarti falls from grace. Sarti finds comfort in an an intellectual and empathic relationship with Louise, escaping competitive pressure from the Ferrari owner and from his own estranged wife. Who will win the big race, and who will lose his life in the next spectacular wreck? It is not that different from an NBC Olympics telecast, where every competitor is battling some personal tragedy and succeeding despite all odds. Grand Prix brings the two elements even closer by using split-screens to contrast the personal and the professional. But as frequently happens with action films, Grand Prix feels very uneven. The racing is done much better than the drama (see next section: The Racing).

It's difficult to blame the actors for this. James Garner is credited first as the main character, and is at ease in the role of the likable American that he cultivated in other films such as The Great Escape. But standing out from the crowd is Yves Montand, stealing every scene with a devoted yet weary performance as Sarti. Garner is a bit too likable and two-dimensional, always doing the honorable thing, whether with Pat or Yamura or Stoddard. In contrast, Sarti displays a hardened side which produces more sympathy from the viewer and from Louise. He has had years of experience and victories — now, when he sees an accident on the track, he ignores the conflagration and puts his foot down hard, just as everyone else is slackening off the pedal. Toshiro Mifune brings an authoritative air to the Japanese industrialist, much like Henry Fonda would bring gravitas to even the most minor film. The Japanese tea sequence with Aron, though perhaps a bit formulaic, reminds us of how the 1960s witnessed the renaissance of Japan, its reemergence as a world power after the Second World War. Likewise, Brian Bedford presents a convincingly icy Stoddard — even in the tender scenes with Pat he seems just degrees above freezing.

No, the blame lies largely with the writing, both for the stock characters and the forgettable dialog. Really, Montand must be commended for wrestling a great part out of merely an above-average role. Plus, his French accent add sparkle and sincerity to some banal dialog. But the plot elements are all too predictable and unexciting. Pat left Scott because she was fed up with the way he'd sweat the night before a race — gosh, haven't we seen this before somewhere? And while Eva-Marie Saint always brings a plain-Jane quality to her dialog, the words here put her dangerously close to a scattered-brained blonde reporter. Note how I have been using first names for the women — in this film, that's about all they are. You remember the men's names because they're doing something, but the women are there just to worry about the men. Louise's role as a reporter is practically a throwaway, as is Pat's modeling. The best part of the writing lies in the jabs that the Europeans make at the Americans. With three writers listed in the credits, including Frankenheimer himself, the film bears all the marks of a poor script barely rescued from mediocrity.

In any case, John Frankenheimer earned his reputation with taut political thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. With a fluffier piece, it seems that he shot the off-course scenes only half-heartedly and put his energies into the racing sequences (no second unit director is credited). A similar dichotomy is visible in the technical aspects of the film. Take the editing, which won a well-deserved Academy Award. Three people were credited, but one can imagine two of them energetically working on the race scenes, while one of them lackadaisically put together the soap opera. Standard angles, medium-close ups, alternating with every change of speaker — there's more variety to be found in a television sitcom.

Even Maurice Jarre's score is fit only for the racing. It's majestic and romantic, with a certain international flavoring in its lushness. Unfortunately, it suffers the indignity of becoming Musack when it's haphazardly placed behind the soap opera scenes. There's one particularly egregious example, where Sarti and Frederickson leave a reception and go into a quiet garage, as the completely inappropriate racing march goes on at low volume behind them. There's no possible diegetic source for the music, and it is merely distracting in a scene that would played better with only dialog. It again feels like a case of neglect from the technical arts, as though the sound mixer was smoking pot (1960s, right?) and blissfully put in the music as filler when none had been written for that scene.

Racing and Technical

So that's the bad news. Given the largely uninteresting soap opera that surrounds the races, it's the action scenes that will make or break the film. And in this case, they knock the ball out of the park. The racing sequences are tremendously exciting, shot from inside, in the air, along the track, in a chase car, pretty much everywhere that a camera can go. The fact that most of it was shot at high speed in real life, much of it at actual Formula One races, gives it a very authentic look. (The aerial scenes, though, end up bumpier than the on-car scenes; today's gyroscopically stabilized aerial rigs almost hang in the air with their fluidity.) The races are enhanced by the editing, with frenetic cutting adding excitement to the races, juxtaposed with longer sequences which give the viewer the big picture and allow you to follow the race.

There's also a fair amount of technical knowledge presented to the viewer. One gets a good flavor of racing history and legends as voiceovers discuss the allure of the Monaco Grand Prix, which takes place on narrow city streets, with little room for passing or margin for error. In voiceover at the climactic final race, the drivers describe how much they hate the bank at Monza, how the tremendous centrifugal force and bumpiness of the bank cause the cars to take a tremendous beating, how the vacuum left behind a car traveling at 200 mph (320 kph) gives rise to a slipstream effect as the trailing cars hit less air resistance. With such extreme performance, one can see the technological writing on the wall, as the edge of the envelope approaches today's computer-modeled cars, which travel so fast that they use an airfoil shape to generate negative lift for better road adhesion. The race at Monza is almost frightening to watch, as cameras mounted on the cars stay fairly stable on the straights, but shake energetically on the banks, accompanied by the convulsive vibrations of the wheels as the suspension struggles with the road surface.

It's surprising that the film was shot in 70mm instead of 35mm — using film that was twice as heavy and moved 25% faster surely made the racing scenes more difficult to shoot than necessary. But this Super Panavision film was originally shown on Cinerama screens, and the long sequences of first-person POVs, shot from the front of a car going over a hundred miles per hour, must have been as enthralling on giant screens as IMAX films are today. The larger film format also results in less graininess in the composites and split-screens, which can be seen on DVD. Those split screens do feel a bit dated, and too avant-garde, especially in mosaics where the screen shows 16 repetitions of the same image. But when the screen splits into thirds, a nice triptych effect emerges — "Wider is better." It's doubly appropriate for a film that was shown in Cinerama theaters. True Cinerama, after all, was shot on three separate pieces of film, and shows visible join lines at the thirds of the screen. In thirds, the screen plays with all the possibilities: symmetric triptychs, non-symmetric triptychs, multi-images, and Cinerama-style panoramas with the full 70mm negative used but with the split lines left in.

The soundtrack on the DVD comes from the revised edition in which Toshiro Mifune's English is dubbed. Perhaps it's more intelligible that way (after all, Sessue Hayakawa is very hard to understand in The Bridge on the River Kwai), but the voice actor's fake Japanese accent comes closer to caricature and is slightly off-sync. In the few sentences of Japanese which were left in Mifune's own voice, he sounds much more distinguished, more like the confident industrialist that he plays. The audio is generally clear, with the dynamic range really showing up in the roars of the engines during the races.

Despite its uneven nature, Grand Prix is sort of a guilty pleasure, a film that has terrific action scenes and is decent overall, and also happens to be quite educational for anyone who is not into Formula One racing.