GRAND PRIX - HD DVD review

At the risk of sounding repetitious and ultimately redundant, I'll say it again: The better looking the print, the better looking the DVD or HD-DVD transfer is going to be. Warner Bros. restored MGM's 1966 Cinerama extravaganza "Grand Prix" from its original 65mm Super Panavision elements, and in both SD and HD DVD editions the result is some of the best-looking video for a live-action picture you'll find on any disc anywhere. Needless to say, the HD-DVD transfer is a touch better than the SD, making it superb.

Even more to the point, "Grand Prix" is the best film ever made about racing cars. Too bad it isn't the best movie ever made about people. Anyway, nobody--not Paul Newman, not Steve McQueen, not Tom Cruise--looked better behind the wheel of a car than "Grand Prix" star James Garner.

In this part-time race-car movie, part-time soap opera, Garner gets plenty of chances behind the wheel. If only the movie had left him there and de-emphasized the various personal romances, this nearly three-hour epic might have come in at a more comfortable two hours and provided a lot more thrills for the buck.

In honor of its fortieth anniversary, Warner Bros. not only fully restored it but decked it out with a goodly assortment of new documentary material. And another nice thing about owning the movie on disc is that after you've seen it once or twice, you can skip the scenes you don't like the next time you watch it. "Grand Prix" is about Formula-One racing, and that's where the action lies.

The film takes us into the public and personal lives of four fictional drivers vying for the world championship during a Grand Prix formula-one racing season. The principals are Pete Aron (James Garner), an American driving for BRM, a man who hasn't won a grand prix event since he left Ferrari three years earlier; Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand), a Frenchman, twice World Champion, now number one at Ferrari but beginning to question his chosen life; Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), Pete's teammate for BRM, a wealthy Englishman trying to live up to the reputation of his older brother, a world champion driver killed in a racing accident; and Nino Barlini (Antonio Sabato), Sarti's teammate for Ferrari, a young, devil-may-care Sicilian, former motorcycle racer, and full-time lover.

Behind the races we meet Louise Frederickson (Eva Maria Saint), an American journalist following the racing season for a fashion magazine, who becomes involved with the married Sarti. We also meet Pat Stoddard (Jessica Walter), Scott Stoddard's wife, a woman who enjoys the high life and hates her husband's risking his life racing. When a car wreck involving her husband's racing car and Pete's car puts her husband out of action, she takes the opportunity to leave him and take up with Pete. That'll teach him. And there are Izo Yamura (Toshiro Mifune), a rich Japanese industrialist with ambitions to field a racing team good enough to win the world championship; and Lise "I don't smoke; I don't drink" (Francoise Hardy), Nino's newest girlfriend. For reasons unknown, Pete practically disappears from the movie's second half, at least up until the final race of the season, making even more room for the sudsy goings on of the other players.

Fortunately, if you can make it through all the ditzy relationships and intrigue, there are the racing sequences to enjoy, and they are most often dazzling. The director was John Frankenheimer, who gave us such films as "Birdman of Alcatraz," "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," and "Ronin," a man who knew his action and suspense, if not his melodramatic romances. He uses a good number of multiple split screens right from the opening titles, a convention that became quite popular in the late 1960s and 70s but has fallen out of favor in the last few decades. The director uses everything at this disposal to provide the visceral excitement of the racing events, from the aforementioned multiple screens to overheads and close-ups, plus plenty of corner camera setups and point-of-view shots. In fact, it is the first-person cockpit shots that are most riveting.

The movie takes us all over Europe, with location shooting in Monaco, France, England, Belgium, etc., and the filming is beautiful in its scope and vision. The French Grand Prix is particularly well photographed, quite poetically presented, and the Belgium Grand Prix is done up mostly in the rain, making for some breathtaking shots. Then, too, all of it is accompanied by Maurice Jarre's sometimes lyrical, sometimes evocative, always stimulating musical score, much of it reminiscent of his work in "Doctor Zhivago," with touches of "Lawrence of Arabia." I mean, you know this is an epic not only by its length but by its overture and its entr'acte music.

Racing veterans Phil Hill, Joakim Bonnier, and Richie Ginther acted as advisors on the film, with Carroll Shelby as technical consultant. Additionally, the director got real-life formula-one drivers Graham Hill, Lorenzo Bandini, Bob Bondurant, Jack Brabham, Jimmy Clark, and others to participate in a number of scenes, lending a further note of authenticity to the proceedings. Graham Hill, incidentally, was almost too good to be true, looking like a young David Niven.

Perhaps the movie's greatest achievement is in capturing the feeling of a bygone racing era, the end of an age in racing history where the competition was still a seat-of-your-pants undertaking, where racing machines were nothing more than engines on wheels, and where strict safety rules and million-dollar endorsements were dreams of the future. Today's Formula-One machines look and behave like intergalactic, science-fi rocket ships, they are so technologically advanced compared to the racing cars of 1966.

But there are also the exaggerated emotions and personal matters to contend with, none of which in and of themselves would probably not happen to somebody in real-life but seem to happen to everyone in this picture simultaneously. Scott is nearly crippled in a horrendous accident but determines to make it back to the track and become a world champion; everybody in the film has an affair with everybody else; the characters are generally vacuous stereotypes, Pete chief among them; team managers are ruthless; and winning is everything to every driver, every owner, and every spectator. It begins to feel like piling on.

As with all sports movies, "Grand Prix" comes down to the final race of the season to determine the world championship, and the tension mounts. Ah, the joys of DVD and HD-DVD, to be able to watch the movie again by clicking only on the racing sequences. They are more than worth the price of the set.

Video:
I was impressed that Warner Bros. did such a superlative job restoring the film and transferring it to disc in standard definition. I am even more impressed with the high-definition results, although the improvement, by comparison, is not tremendously different. Again, the video engineers preserved the film's 2.20:1 theatrical ratio (originally projected, as I've said, on some screens in Cinerama).

The HD-DVD picture is exceptionally clean and vividly detailed, obviously more so than the SD picture. Furthermore, the colors remain entirely natural, never too bright, never too dull; only now in high def they are deeper and richer than ever. Grain, moiré effects, artifacts of any kind were nonissues in standard def, and in high def, they're not even nonissues, they're nonentities. Grain is practically zero except that inherent to the original print; moiré effects are zero; motion effects, halos, pixilation are zero. I have maybe never seen a cleaner picture from any disc. The video is never startling in its brightness, but it is impressive in its sense of realism. As with the standard-definition transfer, there are a few overly dark faces; otherwise, the picture quality must be pretty close to what I imagine the original film print to look like.

Audio:
On the standard-def disc, I was not entirely happy with the sound. The problems, I thought, were that the sound, which was remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1, was sometimes hard and harsh, voices quite often too nasal, dialogue dry and flat, all of it accompanied by a small degree of background hiss. The new Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 processing helps the situation a bit, but apparently there was nothing the audio engineers could do about the vocal elements. In DD+ there is a wide front-channel stereo spread, along with a slightly stronger dynamic impact and a touch greater overall clarity. Still, the rear channels communicate only a small amount of sound, though, in things like engine noise, tires, crowds, and musical ambience. However, the racing sequences continue to be the highlights of the movie, and it is here that the sound serves them well.

Extras:
For the 40th Anniversary Special Edition SD set, Warner Bros. spread the movie over two discs; but here on HD-DVD they include both the movie and four newly made documentaries plus a vintage featurette all on the same side of a single disc. The first documentary, "Pushing the Limit: The Making of Grand Prix," is twenty-eight minutes long and includes commentary from filmmakers, stars, and drivers who worked on the film. Interestingly, we learn that director Frankenheimer originally wanted Steve McQueen to play the part of Pete Aron, but it fell through; and the director insisted that his actors learn to drive race cars and that most of them do at least some of their own driving in the movie. The second documentary, "Flat Out: Formula One in the Sixties," is seventeen minutes long and contains the reminiscences of a number of world-champion drivers about their racing experiences in the 1960s. The third documentary, "The Style and Sound of Speed," eleven minutes long, is all about the photography, sound, and editing of the film; and the fourth documentary, "Brands Hatch: Chasing the Checkered Flag," ten minutes long, is a look at the British Grand Prix course today. Then, there's a promo featurette, "Grand Prix: Challenge of the Champions," twelve minutes, made at the time of the film's production.

The extras wrap up with forty-five scene selections (but no chapter insert); a theatrical trailer; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; English, French, and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. As usual with WB's HD-DVDs, the package also includes pop-up menus, an elapsed time indicator, a zoom-and-pan feature, and an Elite Red HD case.

Parting Thoughts:
For anyone who enjoys motor racing, "Grand Prix" remains the best movie ever made about the subject. Despite its histrionic interludes and emotional glimpses into the drivers' private lives, the racing sequences more than make up for any other deficiencies. In its new HD-DVD transfer, it is a terrific motion picture just to look at, and if you don't like the mushy stuff in between the races, you can always use your remote's "Fast Forward" and "Skip" buttons.