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Saul Bass titles announce the style, the widest of screens prismatically carved for a sprawling symphonie métallique. Formula One racing, business as well as sport, Ben-Hur chariots properly adjusted to the jet-setting death drive. "You sit in a box, a coffin. Gasoline all around you. It's like being inside a bomb. Crazy." Monaco to Monza, variations on "the footloose male." French former champion (Yves Montand), weary of the circuit, bound to ruthless brand and unloving spouse, revived by an affair with the magazine reporter (Eva Marie Saint). Go-getting Yank (James Garner) and brooding Brit (Brian Bedford) in a triangle with the fashion model (Jessica Walter). Italian upstart (Antonio Sabato), matched in vapidity by the girlfriend (Françoise Hardy) who gives the most honest answer when asked about the appeal of the whole thing: "It's marvelous to go very fast." Cars and relationships, "fantastic concentration and rather special skills" are needed. John Frankenheimer rises to the technical challenge, a perilous spectacle wrapped in continental chic, Super Panavision 70 with all the trimmings. Aerial shots chart zigzagging vehicles, intercut with bumper-camera swerves just over the pavement. A recurring gambit pans from a profile of the driver in his seat to a frontal vantage of the road, swaths of pure centrifugal motion gazing ahead to Kubrick's Stargate abstractions. "Old-fashioned scruples" in a modernist arena, dueling industrialists (Toshiro Mifune, Adolfo Celi) have their parts to play. Trophy or fireball in the end, blood for sensation-seeking lenses, a lineage of existential athletes alongside Hawks and Mann. Commercial project or personal venture, "the difference is the art of it." The closing vista adduces a note from Ray's The Lusty Men. Cinematography by Lionel Lindon. With Geneviève Page, Claude Dauphin, Jack Watson, Donal O'Brien, Enzo Fiermonte, and Rachel Kempson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |