May 31, 2011

GRAND PRIX

The recent release of Steve McQueen's Le Mans prompted some great comments from Spy Vibers about another classic racing film, Grand Prix (1966), starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, and Toshiro Mifune. Robert Siegel has posted an in-depth essay about the film at the Blu-ray website here. Grand Prix was released on Blu-ray on May 24th and is available from Amazon for $14.99.

1 comment:

  1. In-depth is an understatement! Quite a spectacular piece that Robert put together. He was a little hyperbolic about the camera cars however. While a Ford GT could reach speeds around 200 mph on the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, it could attain nowhere near that velocity on a Grand Prix circuit.

    The camera cars actually didn’t have to travel at Formula One speeds because they were on the track filming slower F3 cars that were modified to look like F1 cars. Part of the excitement and mastery of Grand Prix is the near-seamless intercutting between actually footage (from helicopters and stationary cameras) of the genuine F1 races of 1966 and on-track footage of the actors in their cosmetically-altered F3 cars.

    Thanks for the heads-up!

    J Kraus

    ReplyDelete