As Brad Pitt's "F1" vroom vrooms to a solid summer movie box office it's worth taking a look at the OG gold standard of auto racing films, John Frankenheimer's GRAND PRIX (1966). This classic film had one foot in the big screen styling of old Hollywood's epics but had the other in the more edgy realism of the coming New Hollywood. The "secret" was leaning hard into a kind of documentary realism and creating powerful sensations of what auto racing was like from the driver's point of view. In fact, I can't think of any car racing or car chasing scenes since GRAND PRIX that are better (though some have certainly equaled it) in terms of putting the audience in the driver's seat. We all probably tend to take this kind of filmmaking for granted today, but what Frankenheimer and his team did to get these shots back in 1966 is truly amazing. It also won Oscars for Best Sound Effects (Gordon Daniel), Best Film Editing and Best Sound (Franklin Milton).
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the film "a smashing and thundering compilation of racing footage shot superbly at the scenes of the big meets around the circuit, jazzed up with some great photographic trickery ... Mr. Frankenheimer belts you with such a barrage of magnificent shots of the racing cars, seen from every angle and every possible point of intimacy, that you really feel as though you've been in it. The octane pace race editing, interspersed with proper high speed car-to-car camera angles; long drivers' Point-of-View (POV) angles (try to stop your head moving in sync with the turns...)[.]"
With so much CGI and post-production extras these days I frequently long for the raw visual and visceral realism of just pointing a camera at the world and capturing something, even if staged, as it happened. I often find these old films revelatory in that respect. The history of film is truly a treasure house.
Here's a great video about this seminal film that almost sixty years ago set the standard still followed by today's filmmakers:
3 people like this
I'm the same, I find myself gravitating to 80s movies, where stunts (and the many many explosions) were real
3 people like this
Cool
3 people like this
It's an amazing film including how each of the four races in the movie where shot in different styles.