F1 is the latest offering of Hollywood’s long-lasting tradition of making car racing into a spectacle on par with superhero fights. Your mileage and taste may vary on which one you gravitate towards, like maybe you prefer the excessive machismo of Days of Thunder to the Americana propaganda of Ford v Ferrari, or vice versa. Nevertheless, if you just walked out of F1 and are wondering how we’ve gotten to a point where Hollywood can make a film that’s so intimate with the need for speed, then you have to go all the way back to 1966 and check out Grand Prix. It’s a truly groundbreaking work by a noted maverick of the Hollywood system, John Frankenheimer, who revolutionized the racing movie with his approach to filming Formula One races that F1 owes a deep debt to.
‘Grand Prix”s Narrative Isn’t Worthy Of Its Racing
Let’s get one disclaimer out of the way: Grand Prix leaves a lot to be desired as a narrative. At 176 minutes long, it spends around half of its runtime on a myriad of melodramatic soap opera subplots about how each of the main character drivers is having women troubles that interfere with their racing capabilities. Each of the four protagonists drives throughout one season of the Formula One circuit, each motivated by personal demons that exacerbate their relationship to racing. Of most concern is the American Pete Aron (James Garner), looking to prove he’s not a has-been, and he shakes things up by joining a new car company called Yamura Motors, led by Izo Yamura (Toshirō Mifune). Or there’s the French Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand), who’s close to retirement and is frequently distracted by falling for an American magazine writer named Louise (Eva Marie Saint). Honestly, this is one of those films where you can take a catnap during any of the talking scenes, because it’s in the racing scenes where it truly comes alive, and you see where the real secret sauce has been applied.
John Frankenheimer Changed How Car Scenes Were Visualized With ‘Grand Prix’
If you could oversimplify what made Frankenheimer’s vision for Grand Prix so special for 1966, it’s this: he insisted on putting the viewers as close to the cars in motion as possible. At a time when most car scenes were still rear-screen projections or processed shots of cars composited onto separate background footage (think like your typical Sean Connery-era James Bond chase), Frankenheimer wanted the action to be as raw and in-the-moment happening as possible. To do this, he essentially had his camera crew use different technological advancements to put his cameras either right onto the bodies of the cars or inside the cockpits of the cars, or sometimes shoot from very far away and/or in the air with lenses that could zoom for an extremely long time. Depending on the situation at hand, the footage would be captured by the cameras on the car being driven, or a separate car would drive alongside the character’s car, and that other car would have cameras on it. This combination of tactics ensured that every motion that the cars made was captured in real time and presented with total accuracy to the physics of any given situation.
‘F1’ and ‘Grand Prix’ Both Excel Most When Just Driving
This is best shown in the various extended sequences where the POV will be right at the front of a car as it zips down a track. Oftentimes, with no accompanying music or extravagant editing, you’ll just see an unbroken take of the real concrete road zooming right past the camera as it feels like your nose is mere inches above the ground. Or the camera will point right into James Garner’s very real face as the sound of the wind whipping against him crashes all around, selling the speed even when the background seems to be all clouds.
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While the film does indulge in some stylistic flourishes that feel like Frankenheimer is having fun with his own challenge, Grand Prix is at its most potent when it basically shuts up and lets its driving do all the talking, with the sound of the whirring tires and harsh winds its only soundtrack. It might not amount to the highest of dramas, but it’ll immediately set your teeth on edge and twist your stomach into knots trying to keep from feeling like you’re going to fall out of the car and violently skid on the track. If there’s any direct link between the Grand Prix of yesteryear and the F1 of today, it’s the simple pleasure of sitting back and just watching an F1 car write its own poetry on the winding tracks they were meant to dominate.
Grand Prix
- Release Date
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December 21, 1966
- Runtime
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176 minutes
- Director
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John Frankenheimer
- Writers
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Robert Alan Aurthur
- Producers
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Edward Lewis, James Garner
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Eva Marie Saint
Louise Frederickson
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Yves Montand
Jean-Pierre Sarti
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Toshirō Mifune
Izō Yamura
