Grand Prix

Grand Prix (1966)

All the glamour and greatness of the world's most exciting drama of speed and spectacle!

The most daring drivers in the world have gathered to compete for the 1966 Formula One championship. After a spectacular wreck in the first of a series of races, American wheelman Pete Aron is dropped by his sponsor. Refusing to quit, he joins a Japanese racing team. While juggling his career with a torrid love affair involving an ex-teammate's wife, Pete must also contend with Jean-Pierre Sarti, a French contestant who has previously won two world titles.

Date of release
1966-12-21
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (242)
Runtime
2h 56m
Genres
Drama, Action
Director
John Frankenheimer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $20.8M
  • Budget: $9M
  • Earned 2.3× its budget
  • Filmed in: Monaco, Charade Circuit, Gour de Tazenat, and Royat
  • Awards: 3 · Nominations: 3. Including: Academy Award for Best Sound Editing; Academy Award for Best Film Editing; Academy Award for Best Sound

Grand Prix is a 1966 American epic sports drama film about Formula One racing, directed by John Frankenheimer, produced by Edward Lewis, and written by Robert Alan Aurthur with uncredited story contributions by Frankenheimer and rewrites by William Hanley. It stars an international ensemble cast, including James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune, Brian Bedford, Jessica Walter, Françoise Hardy and Antonio Sabàto.

Production

Director John Frankenheimer later said when he made the film he had the "choice of making a Grand Hotel type picture or a Test Pilot type picture" and he chose the former. Swedish actress Harriet Andersson was originally cast as the female lead, but was replaced by Eva Marie Saint after the first week of filming.

The making was a race itself as fellow Hollywood icons Steve McQueen and John Sturges planned to make a similar movie exploring the life of racers, with the McQueen/Sturges team initially using the title Day of the Champion. Due to the McQueen/Sturges production's exclusivity contract with the German Nürburgring race track, Frankenheimer had to turn over 27 reels shot there to Sturges.

The production team began by using connections to Grand Prix drivers such as Dan Gurney, Carroll Shelby and former Grand Prix World Champion Phil Hill, who all assisted them in trying to break through an otherwise reluctant European establishment. The filming process meant disrupting vital practice runs and otherwise getting in the way of the actual racers' activities.

The F1 cars in the film are mostly mocked-up Formula Three cars made to look like contemporary Formula One models, although the film also used footage from actual F1 races. Because Yamura Motors is a fictional race team, the producers struck a deal with Bruce McLaren's newly formed McLaren team to have his car, the McLaren M2B, painted with Yamura's colors.

Some of the footage was captured by Phil Hill, the 1961 World Champion, who drove a modified camera car in some sessions during the actual 1966 Monaco and Belgian Grands Prix.. Notably, several aftermaths of incidents from the Belgian Grand Prix were shown during its sequence, but the aftermath of Jackie Stewart from his crash at the Masta Kink was not shown.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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