What a spectacle -- these bullet-shaped racing cars shooting ballistically along the straightaways in Monaco and elsewhere, engines buzzing like a swarm of enormous bees, popping from one frequency to another in quantum leaps as the drivers manipulate the clutch in their bowling shoes.
Bowling shoes? Well, that's what they look like. We get to see a lot of them, and the driving gloves and helmets and wrenches and nuts that director Frankenheimer made sure to include in order to stage authenticity.
The cast is impressive, from James Garner through Yves Montand to Toshiro Mifune. And the LADIES! Elegant blond Eva Marie Saint, stony and sluttish Jessica Walters, and a few glimpses of a stunning young Genevieve Page. Page is being flirted with by a happy-go-lucky young Italian driver. "Drink?" "I don't drink." "Smoke?" "I don't smoke." "Well -- what DO you do?" (She silently looks him up and down.) When you're that lucky, happiness follows as the night the day.
Not all the dialog is clever. It has an elliptical quality, as if somebody had gotten Hemingway mixed up with Sartre. The non sequiturs emerge from the script clipped. "The truth is that I don't get lonely." "I don't follow you." "Don't you?" "Do you?" "What is existence?" "Only a pageant of illusions." Well, I made that last part up but you get the flavor.
The personal lives of the drivers impinge on their professional activities to varying extents, but so what? If you're into racing, this is your kind of movie. The director steps wrong only a few times, mostly at the beginning, when the screen is filled with multiple images, sometimes of the same shot. It's dizzying, like looking in a store window filled with a hundred TV sets, all tuned to the same channel. But the location shooting is fine. There are no crummy special effects and of course no CGI's. Maurice Jarre has written a pleasant melody for the score.
If I were more of an internal adrenalin addict I'd have given it an extra point. It's not at all a stupid movie. We don't have somebody shouting into Tony Curtis' ear, "Take him on the straightaway, Johnny!"
Bowling shoes? Well, that's what they look like. We get to see a lot of them, and the driving gloves and helmets and wrenches and nuts that director Frankenheimer made sure to include in order to stage authenticity.
The cast is impressive, from James Garner through Yves Montand to Toshiro Mifune. And the LADIES! Elegant blond Eva Marie Saint, stony and sluttish Jessica Walters, and a few glimpses of a stunning young Genevieve Page. Page is being flirted with by a happy-go-lucky young Italian driver. "Drink?" "I don't drink." "Smoke?" "I don't smoke." "Well -- what DO you do?" (She silently looks him up and down.) When you're that lucky, happiness follows as the night the day.
Not all the dialog is clever. It has an elliptical quality, as if somebody had gotten Hemingway mixed up with Sartre. The non sequiturs emerge from the script clipped. "The truth is that I don't get lonely." "I don't follow you." "Don't you?" "Do you?" "What is existence?" "Only a pageant of illusions." Well, I made that last part up but you get the flavor.
The personal lives of the drivers impinge on their professional activities to varying extents, but so what? If you're into racing, this is your kind of movie. The director steps wrong only a few times, mostly at the beginning, when the screen is filled with multiple images, sometimes of the same shot. It's dizzying, like looking in a store window filled with a hundred TV sets, all tuned to the same channel. But the location shooting is fine. There are no crummy special effects and of course no CGI's. Maurice Jarre has written a pleasant melody for the score.
If I were more of an internal adrenalin addict I'd have given it an extra point. It's not at all a stupid movie. We don't have somebody shouting into Tony Curtis' ear, "Take him on the straightaway, Johnny!"