Grand Prix

Media:	VHS Tape
Directed by:	John Frankenheimer
Starring:	James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand
Release date:	05 February, 2002
List price:	~~$19.98~~
Our price:	that is 100% off!

Grand Prix

Average rating: Stars

Grand Prix

Simply put, the greatest racing film ever made (or will be made).
There will never be another one like it because it is a masterpiece in every respect.

Grand Prix - James Garner, Eva Marie Saint and more

Masterco

The best F1 picture ever made. It presents a whole season of a golden era of Grand Prix racing. Its glamour, excitment, its simbols and all its thrills.

James Garner, Eva Marie Saint and more - Grand Prix

GRAND PRIX and THE GAMES

Giving the movie five stars is a no brainer. Everyone who ever managed to see this film in a theater loved it. Eva Marie Saint had a pretty long career as a leading lady considering she wasn't glamorous and she wasn't sexy, though she often played in sexy parts. Most often she was the blonde madonna type, chic and shiny, as in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and she had Actors Studio cachet, people thought she was a serious actress. She was fine playing opposite Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT and with Paul Newman in EXODUS. She played Kitty, the American visitor to Israel, and sometimes in GRAND PRIX she seems to be channeling all of "Kitty's" mannerisms, for both parts allow the US viewer to somehow enter, through her eyes, a complicated and complex European social system we might otherwise fail to register with. This is what she does best, and as the journalist Louise Frederickson she goes right to the heart of the matter, travelling on an expense account through Monaco, Nice, Monza, everywhere the story of Formula One takes her. And what a story it is!

As soon as Monaco explodes into the fiery crash that injures poor Scott Stoddard, we see that Pete Aaron is carrying around the burden of guilt for this accident, even though Scott himself went in with his eyes open. This gives GRAND PRIX a good dramatic edge that some of the other racing movies don't have. Such as LE MANS or WINNING, even though I like them both too. Here in GRAND PRIX director John Frankenheimer lets us see Aaron's inner working out of his guilt. At the same time we see Yves Montand struggling through his conflicts about racing politics and his own preference for l'amour. The two storylines ping and pong back and forth creating their own tension. This is one feature that belongs on DVD pronto. And while they're at it, tell me, what about THE GAMES with Ryan O'Neal? Not a racing picture per se, but it is the Olympics version of GRAND PRIX, with Charles Aznavour playing the Yves Montand part. I don't think THE GAMES came out even on video! What's the story and why are they suppressing the great movies about competition? THE GAMES is from a treatment by Erich Segal, the author of LOVE STORY, and features his LOVE STORY ephebe Ryan O'Neal in a prominent role. O'NEAL plays an Ivy League sprinter, a golden boy, who decides to enter the Marathon at the Olympics with a little assist from his best friend, Sam Elliott, whose deep deep voice is put to good use as he joins O'Neal in a Tokyo hot tub and calls him "baby" throughout in a Barry White baritone. When O'Neal tries to recover from not enough sleep, Sam Elliott hands him a pill. Then when the runner stumbles in the business section of Tokyo, Sam flags him down and palms him off with another pill. You know trouble is on its way!

But what about Stanley Baker, the most brooding masculine man in British acting, coming over like Heathcliff and dominating not Cathy Earnshaw but tall, bumbling Michael Crawford in his full Frank Spencer mode straight out of "SOME MOTHERS DO `AVE `EM." Crawford plays a milkman, Harry Hayes, who gets taken up by the toffs who run the Royal Running Club and match him up with tyrannical, overbearing coach Stanley Baker. In one scene Crawford flops around a padded room, wearing extra clothes, while the thermostat registers 150 degrees, while Stanley Baker barks orders, while himself stripped for comfort down to a skimpy pair of white bikini underpants. It is bizarre indeed.

Well, so is Charles Aznavour as the Czech track god Valcek, once the world record holder and now ordered at age 41 to re-enter the Olympics by his Communist boss to give Communism a good name. And there is an Australian story with an aborigine abused and misused by two white yobbo trainers slash bookies.

A great show with lots of action and a wonderful performance by Leigh Taylor Young as a coed Ryan O'Neal takes a shine to.

In the meantime at least we have GRAND PRIX on VHS!