Metal in Motion

Grand Prix. The Formula One is the thoroughbred of racing cars. Nothing on wheels is quite so sophisticated. Formula Ones can cost up to $100,000 to build, and as much again to maintain for a single racing season. Twelve feet long and elegantly slender, they look like bright green, blue, red, purple dragonflies perched on fat black feet. Though the cars weigh a mere 1,100 Ibs., their three-liter engine develops more than 375 h.p., and they can dart down a straightaway at better than 200 m.p.h. At full bore, a Formula One handles so neurotically that in all the world of motor racing only 20 men are fully qualified to drive it.

Eleven major races will be held next season at eleven Grand Prix courses.* Last season, as the top drivers varoomed the circuit, they were tailgated by Director John Frankenheimer and 16 camera teams. By season's end, at a cost of $7,500,000, Frankenheimer & Co. had shot 1,000,000 film feet of Formula One racing--some of it real, some of it rigged, all of it in Metrocolor of admirable luster. Out of this ava lanche of acetate, the director has constructed a motion picture that crams the supercolossal Super Panavision screen with some of the most spectacular pictures ever taken of metal in motion.

There are some sense-flogging sequences in which a camera attached to a racing car is lowered to within an inch of the track, so that when the car skims along at 150 m.p.h. and the track comes rushing at the spectator's face, he may suffer the illusion that he is right there in the car, and that if he doesn't find that brake pedal pretty damn quick he's never going to make the next corner. And there is one phony but heart-stopping crash in which a racing car leaps off the road surface at better than 100 m.p.h., turns sideways in the air and for one long, insanely impossible instant goes skittering along the face of a cliff like a rampaging firecracker.

Regrettably, Director Frankenheimer occasionally feels obliged to stop racing and start plotting. He has four heroes (James Garner, Yves Montand, Brian Bedford, Antonio Sabato), all cast as racing drivers. The story purports to describe what they do when they are not driving--and the girls they do it with. The girls (Eva Marie Saint, Francoise Hardy, Jessica Walter) are pretty, but somehow they don't seem all that exciting in a film that focuses so satisfactorily on a different sort of exquisitely classy chassis.

* France's Le Mans, Monaco's Monte Carlo, Holland's Zandvoort, Germany's Niirburgring, Belgium's Spa-Francorchamps, Britain's Silverstone, Italy's Monza, South Africa's Kyalami Circuit, Mexico's Mexico City, Canada's Mosport Park, the U.S.'s Watkins Glen.

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