06/07/2006
FEATURE BY MIKE LAWRENCE
The editor and I agree on most things. Okay, he supports Tottenham Hotspur and I support Arsenal and the animosity between the two clubs is rarely seen outside of Latin countries. On the other hand we are both life long supporters of our clubs, we were taken to see them when we were children and they were our local clubs. We are not like those people who support Manchester United on television and who could not find Manchester on a map.
We are also both movie buffs and rarely disagree. I was a little surprised to see that Chris has written that Days of Thunder was a successful film. I think he is boasting that he has watched more than 20 minutes (15 actually - Ed) of this dire farrago which bombed at the box office. It was predictable that it should bomb, as it was predictable that Driven would bomb. Most motor racing movies have been clunkers and the reason is that the hardware gets in the way.
Will Ferrell's NASCAR comedy, Talladega Nights opens in the States on 4th August and elsewhere will probably go straight to DVD. It may not be a clunker for two reasons, one is that Ferrell (above) is a very gifted comedy actor and the other is that it is a comedy and the jokes have to involve human beings. That said, history is against it.
I have no interest in horse racing but I have read most of the novels written by former champion steeplechase jockey, Dick Francis. There is actually very little racing in Francis's novels, rather he uses his expert knowledge as background. The hero in one is a photographer who specialises in racing, in another the central character is an air taxi pilot who ferries jockeys so they can ride in more than one meeting on the same day. The book goes into the detail of the sport and one hero is a wine merchant, look at the hospitality suites.
The two sports which have spawned the most good movies are boxing and baseball. The most recent major boxing movie, Million Dollar Baby actually contains very little boxing. The baseball movies, Field of Dreams and Bull Durham have very little baseball. The drama is off the park. A movie interests us because of the people and motor racing movies tend to concentrate on the hardware.
Motor racing has given the world a catalogue of clunkers: Johnny Dark, The Devil's Hairpin, Death Race 2000, The Mask of Death, The Green Helmet, The Crowd Roars, Red Line 7000, Checkpoint, Wild Racers, The Big Wheel.... Many featured top stars, but they bombed.
If you make a film starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Robert Duvall you can usually start counting the money, but not if you put Cruise in a tin top. Motor racing defies movie makers. The sport is rich in stories, and has an abundance of larger than life characters, but on the screen we usually get banality.
An exception is The Last American Hero, based on the life of Junior Johnson. There were two reasons, one is that Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski - Ed) is one of the best movie actors of all and the other was it was based on a superb essay by Tom Wolfe. Most of the movie is about Junior Johnson's early career as a moonshine runner, 'shine was the family business, and he took up racing to get his father out of gaol.
Winning was better than average, but mainly because of the off track love triangle. In fact it did not need to be about motor racing at all, it could have been about tennis or skiing. The one good thing was it brought Paul Newman into motor racing.
Since we're taking movie stars, Steve McQueen was heavily into the sport. In 1970 he and Peter Revson were second in the Sebring 12 Hours only 20 seconds behind a works Ferrari. He was a great friend of John Whitmore and was staying with him when John clinched the 1961 British Saloon Car Championship in a Mini. With the title in the bag, Whitmore lent McQueen his car for a race at Brands Hatch where he finished third. He was due a second race, but was called back to Hollywood.
In Grand Prix, the action was great, but the script left no cliché unmolested. Then there was Graham Hill's impersonation of a block of wood. Hill was a witty man, and a brilliant after dinner speaker, but in Grand Prix he was not convincing as an animate lifeform, let alone a World Champion. It is the art of the actor to be convincing and James Garner, Yves Montand, etc., were all convincing as racing drivers. I've met Junior Johnson who is a very softly spoken man, not at all like Jeff Bridges portrayed him, but Bridges was acting a script and was completely convincing as a character in a movie.
Le Mans, apparently, did not have a script. It had atmosphere, some great shots of the ironware, and it had Steve McQueen looking intense, and McQueen did intense better than anyone. McQueen made Mitchum look agitated. It missed the point however that all drama, including comedy, needs conflict. A joke is a building of tension and then releasing it which is why the reaction of a an audience cared or shocked by a scene is first an intake of breath and then laughter. Conflict is essential.
A movie cannot improve on the best of modern TV coverage of a race. Fiction cannot compete with the drama of the real thing because fiction has to work towards a predetermined conclusion. You can run out of fuel on the last lap in real life, but you cannot in a movie because it won't be believed.
Stroker Ace came from an amusing novel, but even the sight of Burt Reynolds dressed as a chicken did not make the movie funny. Look at the comedy motor racing movies. There were some great sequences in the silent days, but Cannonball Run? Cannonball Run II? The Great Race? Those Magnificent Men in their Jaunty Jalopies? And, with apologies to 12 year olds, the Herbie series? Zzzzzzzz.
Movie guru, the late Leslie Halliwell, reckoned that the best use of motor racing in a movie was the 1938 British B movie Ask A Policeman starring Will Hay. It was a comedy about an incompetent policeman on the trail of smugglers, but a bus accidentally gets on to the Brooklands track during a race. It's a comic sequence, not a film. (Will Hay was a genius, however you also left out Stanley Baxter's The Fast Lady - which featured a dream sequence involving John Surtees! - Ed)
Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, made a film about Fangio in 1976. It was to the commission of Count Giovanni Volpi di Misturi, who had been involved in both the ATS and Serenissima projects. It is not listed on Internet Movie Database, or on Rotten Tomatoes. Memory tells me that it was never actually released,but I saw it in 1984 in a one off showing at the National Film Theatre in London. There were some good racing shots, but it said nothing about the man. Every so often you would have a shot of the great man gazing into the distance and this was supposed to be significant. Fangio's was a remarkable story, from poor mechanic to national hero to five times World Champion. It was an opportunity wasted.
Motor racing abounds in wild and whacky stories, but how many motor racing jokes have you ever heard? I've heard two, and one was funny. I know more golf jokes than motor racing jokes and it is my sincere wish that I never grow so feeble that I will ever show an interest in golf.
When we watch a movie we expect a different experience to a motor race. We want the human element. With motor racing movies, producers concentrate too much on the hardware, but there are any number of action flicks where you get screeching hardware. The car chases in John Frankenheimer's Ronin are a darned sight more exciting than the action in his Grand Prix. (Try also The French Connection and The Seven Ups, both involve car chases featuring Bill Hickman, driver of the Dodge Charger in Bullitt - Ed)
Racing has worked only when it has been part of the plot, not the pivot. In the 1964 version of The Killers, a driver is essential to pulling off a heist. The gang recruits a man (John Cassavetes - Ed) who was a leading driver until an accident. He is grubbing a living by driving in stock cars and, get this, they all had large aerofoils on their roofs and the movie was released in 1964. His driving skills are essential to the robbery and the getaway sequence is very good. The Killers was Ronald Reagan's last movie and the only one in which he played a bad guy.
Dance With A Stranger is the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. She was a nightclub hostess, no better than she should have been, who shot dead her lover, David Blakeley, who had driven for the works Bristol team at Le Mans. Blakeley was the stepson of Sir Humphrey Cook, former racing driver and a backer of ERA.
When London's Steering Wheel Club closed for the night, the party animals went to Ruth's nightclub, she was part of the racing scene, and she helped finance Blakely's pet project, the Emperor HRG. That was never going to work because the HRG was an unsuitable basis for a competition car by then, he should have bought a Lotus Mk VI, but Blakeley believed in it and believed he could be a first class driver. He did drive for Bristol, but the company had a policy of using competent club drivers rather than top names because it entered only Le Mans and the Reims 12 Hour race.
Blakely practised the Emperor on the Saturday for the 1955 Goodwood Easter Monday Meeting, met a wronged woman on the Sunday, and posted a DNS on the Monday.
The movie has some very good racing sequences specially shot at Goodwood and features both LOY 500, Cliff Davis's Tojeiro Bristol and an actor playing Cliff Davis. I spoke to Cliff about the murder and he was firmly on Blakeley's side, though the film portrays him as an utter sh one t. John Cooper, on the other hand, thought Ruth Ellis was a great girl who made up huge picnic lunches to feed half the paddock.
The best portrayal of motor racing I have seen was a 70 minute BBC television play called Mille Miglia. Until the credits rolled there was hardly a racing car on screen, except the director did manage to get a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR which was mainly used as a prop. Most of the play took place in a hotel room, in Brescia, in 1955.
Televised in 1968, Mille Miglia examined the relationship between Stirling Moss (played by Michael Bryant) and Denis Jenkinson (Ronald Lacey) as they prepared for the race. It concentrated on the fact that each was putting his life in the hands of the other.
Moss and Jenks practised their hand signals, and it didn't always go right. In the hotel room Moss 'crashed' and it was more terrifying than smashed up hardware. It was terrifying because Moss could turn on Jenks and describe the result of the mistake.
The play examined what made them prepared to put their lives on the line. The author picked one incident and made it stand for the entire sport.
It worked because the script explored a relationship. It was written by a young South African actor, then working in London, called Athol Fugard. It was Fugard's first performed script and he is now one of the world's most admired playwrights. He knew that the most vivid pictures are in the heads of the audience and he wrote a magnificent piece about motor racing without using cars.
Note: The picture of Will Ferrell is from the Sony Pictures motion picture Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.