Grand Prix

Two separate movies awkwardly jammed together. One, in the cars, is an exhilarating racing film that is beautifully shot, edited and put together. The other, a really soapy, over-long pile of crap about racing drivers and attractive ladies trying to get in each other's pants. Even the brilliant editing and camera work is toned down once the race stops. The racing parts are so good and so influential that it makes up for the rest of it.

If you're watching Grand Prix for the plot, you're watching it wrong.

Exhilarating racing sequences highlight fairly pedestrian and soapy screenplay. Montand and Saint come off best in the performance stakes; Garner is unfortunately too wooden and his will-they-or-won't-they relationship with married Walter becomes dreary. Celi also provides an excellent cameo. Hurt by extreme overlength, but use of sound and vision to convey racing sequences is impressive, as is Jarre's music score which cleverly incorporates the revving of car engines to amusing effect.

A married French car racing driver starts a relationship with an American woman, and an American driver borrows the wife of an injured English driver during his convalescence. Perhaps that seemed promising, but the movie never gets out of first gear and it’s hard to believe the filmmakers, who went to enormous effort, were not aware of the inadequacy of the screenplay, which seems to want to argue that car racing drivers are obsessed with death, but it’s ultimately the film that seems that way.

Revolutionary racing footage that holds extremely well. The rest of the movie is passable.

Try to catch me, but you're too slow, too slow, too slow

The racing scenes are fantastic.

A surprisingly well done and interesting film. The acting is decent overall with most of the actors doing well. Some of the drivers are less interesting than others but the film managed to keep me entertained for its entire 3 hour run time.

Em honra de James Garner: É um bom filme, o problema é que ele é muito longo.

Would have been great if the amount of dialogue and off-track drama had been cut to a minimum, much like the Le Mans film from 1971. It's funny how even the camerawork and lighting gets markedly worse in off-track scenes, clearly this was put hastily together. Not much thought was put into the casting either, it's painful to see Toshiro Mifune in the role as an F1 team owner.

"Yes, the driving scenes dazzle, but Frankenheimer also embeds his 1966 Cinerama epic with some interesting commentary about risk-taking professions in general and the Formula One driver in specific"

Good film.

What a terrible movie with the flimsiest plot and a string of impressive cameos. The movie is way too long and this film should have been edited way down or never made at all.

If you can't see this in 70mm, at least try and catch it in hi-def.