Grand Prix (1966) Director John Frankenheimer's 3 hour Cinerama, Formula One race car spectacle came after he'd made a series of brilliant dramas and thrillers.....'Seven Days In May', 'The Train', 'The Manchurian Candidate, 'Birdman Of Alcatraz' and the defiantly weird, creepy "Seconds" with Rock Hudson.
All of those previous films, featured the young director's unerring camera placement and editing used to highlight superb, award-worthy performances from his actors.
With 'Grand Prix', Frankenheimer fully embraced the latest technologies of filmmaking.......but kicked his actors to the curb. Unlike his other films, here the actors and the characters they play were reduced to nothing but cardboard game pieces, randomly moved around to fit the skimpy storyline.
In that regard, you can consider it a precursor to the 'disaster' cycle of films kicked off by Irwin Allen's "The Poseidon Adventure".....populated with slumming, bored stars picking up a fast paycheck for doing hardly anything at all.
"Grand Prix", which blandly follows the lives and fates of four drivers on the race car circuit more than delivered the kind of wham-bams that today's IMAX monstrosities promise us.....loud noisy soundtrack, dizzying visuals and every so often, a fireball to blow shit up.
Filmed in Ultra Panavision and thrown on to a curved, wrap-around Cinerama screen, the audience gets lengthy drivers -eye views of cars zipping around curves at 180 miles per hour. And at times, well known visualist and main title maestro Saul Bass divides the screen up into multiple pieces........(a technique the some film directors fell in love with for about a year and a half - as in Norman Jewison's "The Thomas Crown Affair" and Richard Fleischer's "The Boston Strangler")
And the actors? The story? Worthless time-fillers in between the vroom-vrooms. James Garner, Yves Montand, Brian Bedford and Antonio Sabato (playing the drivers) walk through their roles as if they already know how uninteresting they are.....to both themselves and the audience.
Frankenheimer takes great pains to show us the actors actually driving the cars......but you wonder why he bothered, In most of the shots, they've got goggles and face coverings on
And we can only shake our head at the sight of the monumental world cinema icon Toshiro Mifune embarrassingly dubbed in by Paul Frees, who made his voicing of Asian actors sound like his cartoon character Boris Badenov from "Rocky And Bulwinkle".
For those who love the sight of sight of fast cars threatening to go hurling into oblivion (which they sometimes do in this film, big surprise), then they might find "Grand Prix" an orgiastic delight.....as long as they remember to fast forward through all the soapy, dreary dramatics.
For everyone else, despite all its ambitious heft and length, it's a minor work in John Frankenheimer's filmography. 2 vroom-vrooms (**)
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