As another Formula 1 season reaches its climax, Cinema Paradiso takes a look at the depiction of motor racing on the screen. This isn't just a list of recommendations for petrolheads, however, as the need for speed has inspired plenty of compelling human stories.
The motor car and the motion picture camera were both part of the inventing boom that took place in the last years of the 19th century. Designed by Carl Benz, the Benz Patent Motor Car first appeared in 1885 and much of the next decade saw inventors across Europe and the United States competing to produce the first practical movie camera. The efforts of William Friese-Greene are recalled in John Boulting's affectionate, if fanciful all-star biopic, The Magic Box (1951). But the race was won by Thomas Alva Edison, whose battle with George Westinghouse to provide America with electricity is recalled in Alfonso Gomez-Rijon's The Current War (2017).
Getting the Wheels Turning
The earliest organised automobile competition was held between Paris and Rouen in 1894, the year in which the Holland brothers opened the first peep show parlour at 1155 Broadway to showcase Edison's Kinetoscope device. While Louis and Auguste Lumière were perfecting their Cinématographe camera-projector, the first road rallies were taking place in 1895 between Paris and Bordeaux in France and between Chicago and Evanston, Illinois in the United States. Georges Méliès had started to transform a novelty into an art form by the time the earliest closed-circuit road race was held at the Course de Périgueux in 1898.
Several of the earliest films to focus on motor racing were comedies, although there was plenty of authentic footage in Wilfred Lucas's The Speed Kings (1913), in which Ford Sterling tries to end daughter Mabel Normand's infatuation with driver Teddy Tetzlaff. The same was true of another of producer Mack Sennett's slapstick romps, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), which introduced Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. This improvised short can be found on the Chaplin at Keystone collection and Cinema Paradiso customers can also enjoy Larry Semon and Oliver Hardy competing for the chance to date Dorothy Dwan in Kid Speed (1924).
A romantic subplot was key to many motor movies in the silent era, including George Melford's The Race (1916), in which Victor Moore allows Anita King to win a roadster race across America because she needs the prize money to help her father. But the genre was popularised by Wallace Reid, a former driver who became a dashing silent star before he succumbed to his drug addiction at the age of just 31. Among his daredevil auto outings were The Roaring Road (1919), Excuse My Dust (1920) and Across the Continent (1922).
One of the many copycat productions starred Johnny Hines as an industrialist's son whose motor-racing ambitions are curtailed when he is robbed and hooks up with a band of hobos in George Beranger's Burn 'Em Up Barnes (1921), which was reworked into a talkie serial in 1934. Released shortly after Reid died, Paul Powell's Racing Hearts (1922) cast Richard Dix as the motor ace who enters the Vanderbilt road race in a new model designed by Theodore Roberts, the father of his best girl, Agnes Ayres.
When talkies came, film producers were quick to exploit the excitement of roaring engines and screeching tyres in pictures like A. Edward Sutherland's Burning Up (1930), Leigh Jason's High Gear (1933) and Edward Sedgwick's Burn 'Em Up O'Connor (1939). The last starred Dennis O'Keefe and Nat Pendleton as a driver and his mechanic buddy investigating a series of suspicious crash deaths in a drama based on the novel Salute to the Gods by Malcolm Campbell. He was famously and tragically followed in his attempts to break the land speed record by his son, Donald, and Billy Zane makes his own bid for immortality in a rocket-powered car in Christian McIntire's Landspeed (2002).
Hollywood wasn't alone in making racing pictures, however, with Curt Froelich and Henry Roussell's The Night Belongs to Us (1929) and Erich Schönfelder's Contest (1932) exciting audiences in Weimar Germany, while Italians thrilled to Mario Baffico's The Dance of Time (1936). Britain imported Edward L. Cahn to make Death Drives Through (1935), which can be found on Volume 3 of The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection and includes footage shot at the famous Brooklands circuit to enliven Robert Douglas's bid to prove his worth after causing the death of a rival.
Those Wacky Races
The London to Brighton vintage car rally provides the excuse for John Gregson to test out his 1904 Darracq against Kenneth More's 1905 Spyker in Henry Cornelius's Genevieve (1953), which also sees Dinah Sheridan, Kay Kendall and a St Bernard named Susie going along for the ride. How Dirk Bogarde and Guy Middleton must have regretted turning down the male leads, as this remains one of British cinema's most enduring gems. Borrowing the antiquarian angle, Gerald Thomas's The Iron Maiden (1962) gives Michael Craig a chance to test the mettle of his steam-powered traction engine at the Annual Steam Rally at Woburn Abbey, while the decade also saw all-star casts line-up for some hijinks in jalopies in Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965) and Ken Annakin's Monte Carlo or Bust (1969).
Cop Spencer Tracy proves an interested spectator as Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Ethel Merman, Terry-Thomas and Mickey Rooney join the cross-country dash to find $350,000 in hidden loot in Stanley Kramer's stellar caper, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). The idea of a manic pursuit with plenty of shenanigans obviously appealed to animation titans William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who launched the TV series Wacky Races in 1968.
Who can forget those crazy contenders: The Ant Hill Mob in Chuggaboom; Dick Dastardly and Muttley in the Mean Machine; The Gruesome Twosome in the Creepy Coupe; Lazy Luke and Blubber Bear in the Arkansas Chugabug; Professor Pat Pending in the Covert-a-Car; Peter Perfect in the Turbo Terrific; Penelope Pitstop in the Compact Pussycat; Red Max in the Crimson Haybailer; Rock and Gravel Slag in the Boulder Mobile; Rufus Ruffcut and Sawtooth in the Buzz Wagon; and Sergeant Blast and Private Meekly in the Army Surplus Special?
Such was the success of a show that was retooled in 2017 that Hanna-Barbera spun off two other series, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (both 1969). Taking its cues from Ken Annakin's Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), the former followed the villains of Wacky Races, as they formed the Vulture Squad with Klunk and Zilly to prevent Yankee Doodle Pigeon from delivering top-secret messages. The latter harked back to the classic Pearl White serial, The Perils of Pauline (1914), as the Ant Hill Mob attempt to protect heiress Penelope Pitstop from the machinations of her guardian, Sylvester Sneekly, in the guise of criminal mastermind, the Hooded Claw.
Hanna-Barbera were also behind Roy Patterson's Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988), which sees Count Dracula turn Shaggy into a lycanthrope and cause Scooby to enter Transylvania's Monster Car Race in order to return his pal to normal. The Mystery Inc. gang also have to join forces with a driver called The Undertaker to defeat an off-road racer known as Inferno in Tim Divar's Scooby-Doo! and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon (2016).
Such madcap cartoon antics must have inspired Paul Bartel's Cannonball (1976), in which wicked Bill McKinney will do anything he can to prevent David Carradine from winning the $100,000 prize in the free-for-all Trans-American Grand Prix between Los Angeles and New York. The unexpected success of this riotous free-for-all doubtless piqued the interest of former stuntman Hal Needham, who knew how to stage an action sequence and drew on his own experiences for The Cannonball Run (1981), which sees Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Jackie Chan, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. on the starting grid for the Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.
Such was the popularity of the picture that Needham reassembled the majority of the cast for Cannonball Run II (1984), while also adding Shirley Maclaine and Frank Sinatra for what would be his screen swan song. Reynolds and Needham also reunited on the NASCAR caper, Stroker Ace (1983), before Reynolds played the bad guy in Jay Chandrasekhar's The Dukes of Hazzard (2005), as Boss Hogg hires pro driver Billy Pickett (James Roday) to win the rally that Luke (Johnny Knoxville) and Bo Duke (Seann William Scott) have entered in their souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, the General Lee.
Back in the animated realm, rookie racer Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is taught a few lessons about life in the fast line by Doc Hudson (Paul Newman) and Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) in John Lassiter's Cars (2006), which Pixar followed with the sequels Cars 2 (2011) and Cars 3 (2017), which respectively accompany Lightning and tow truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) in a bid to win the World Grand Prix and follow their battles with brash new competitors like Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer). Only the first picture was nominated for an Oscar, however, but it was pipped at the post by George Miller's Happy Feet.
Peter Andre voices an equally bumptious yellow car named Ace in David Stoten's Thomas and Friends: Big World! Big Adventures!: The Movie (2018), which sees the blue tank engine leave the Island of Sodor to follow his brash new friend as he competes in rallies on all five continents. The racing game SugarRush is key to the action in Rich Moore's Disney hit, Wreck-It Ralph (2012), while a trip to eBay brings Ralph and Vanellope Von Schweetz into conflict with Slaughter Race villain, Shank, in Moore and Phil Johnston's sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Both films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature but lost out respectively to Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman's Brave and Bob Persichetti and Peter Ramsey's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
On the Right Track
Such was the increase in car ownership in postwar America that people were able to attend motor-racing events in greater numbers. Moreover, a growing variety of competitive forms began to evolve, including stock, drag and saloon car racing, as well as demolition derbies.
Always looking for novelty, Hollywood seized on the differing styles, with Charles Barton's Buck Privates Come Home (1947) seeing Bud Abbott and Lou Costello pal up with midget car racer Tom Brown, as he competes to win $20,000 in the Gold Cup Stakes, providing he can get his car out of hock. British film-makers also latched on to motor movies, with Rona Anderson setting her cap at American driver Paul Carpenter in Wolf Rilla's Stock Car (1955) after he helps her keep hold of the garage owned by her late father, But rival racer Paul Whitsun-Jones's girlfriend, Susan Shaw, has designs on Carpenter and plans to take his eyes off the prize.
Elvis Presley's Lucky Jackson finds himself sidelined when his engine packs up in George Sidney's Viva Las Vegas (1964), Keen to enter the gambling capital's inaugural Grand Prix, he has to find work as a waiter and enter a talent contest to pay for his repairs and show up pushy swimming instructor Ann-Margret. Presley also plays part-time driver Mike McCoy preparing for a road race in Norman Taurog's Spinout (1966) and he reunited with the same director to put the pedal to the metal as World 600 stock car driver Steve Grayson, who runs into tax collector Nancy Sinatra in Speedway (1968).
The pop side of the sport is also to the fore as Fabian becomes a stunt driver at the Thrill Circus run by Annette Funicello's father in Richard Rush's Thunder Alley (1967). The following year, Fabian's stock car racer joins the European Grand Prix circuit after an accident in Daniel Haller's The Wild Racers (1968), which had certain scenes directed by Roger Corman. He also produced Jack Hill's Pit Stop (1969), in which street racer Richard Davalos is bailed out of chokey by businessman Brian Donlevy so he can challenge the reckless Sid Haig on the infamous Figure Eight demolition track.
Dean Jones is also reduced to driving in demolition derbies before he meets a white Volkswagen with a mind of its own and he and Herbie seek glory in the El Dorado rally in Robert Stevenson's The Love Bug (1968), which proved such a hit that Disney entrusted the VW to Ken Barry and Stefanie Powers in Stevenson's Herbie Rides Again (1974) before Jones slotted back into the driver's seat for Vincent McEveety's Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1978). Charles Martin Smith took the wheel for McEveety's Herbie Goes Bananas (1980) before Lindsay Lohan rescues the Beetle from a junkyard and gets him back on track in every sense of the term in Angela Robinson's Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005).
Remarkably few films have been made about women drivers, but Bonnie Bedelia earned a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of drag racer Sheila Muldowney in Jonathan Kaplan's biopic, Heart Like a Wheel (1983). The same year saw Brooke Shields enter the 1927 Trans-African Rally in late father Steve Forrest's revolutionary hot rod in Andrew V. McLaglen's Sahara (1983), which proved a huge flop for the Cannon duo of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and saw Shields become the first and only actress to win Worst Supporting Actor at the Golden Raspberry Awards for sporting a moustache in order to trick the race organisers into thinking she's a man.
Directed by the Wachowskis, Speed Racer (2008) also picked up a clutch of Razzie nominations for its account of racer Emile Hirsch's bid to win a Grand Prix with the help of parents John Goodman and Susan Sarandon, girlfriend Christina Ricci and his younger brother's pet monkey Chim Chim. Poor little rich girl Adèle Exarchopoulos gets her kicks driving for her father's track team before being distracted by smooth criminal Matthias Schoenaerts in Michael R. Roskram's Racer and the Jailbird (2017). Contrasting with this glossy escapism is the dose of harsh reality that Amber Fares captures in the documentary, Speed Sisters (2015), which profiles Palestinians Mona Ali, Noor Dauod, Maysoon Jayyusi, Betty Saadeh and Marah Zahalka, who have made names for themselves on the street racing circuit in the West Bank.
The cars steal the limelight in Howard Hawks's Red Line 7000 (1965), which sees a young James Caan playing a stock car racer unhappy with the way his team is being run. Jeff Bridges makes his mark as a demolition derby driver before graduating to stock cars and setting his sights on the NASCAR circuit in Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero (1973), while ex-Marine Dan Haggerty tries to make a living repossessing vehicles and finds himself competing in the underworld drag racing event known as Slam Track in Joseph Merhi's Repo Jake (1990). The same year saw the release of Tony Scott's Days of Thunder, in which maverick stock car driver Tom Cruise is teamed with taskmaster designer Robert Duvall for a tilt at the Winston Cup at the Daytona 550.
The NASCAR circus comes in for some good-natured ribbing in Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), which stars Will Ferrell as the top-rank driver whose place as Dennit Racing's line-up alongside buddy John C. Reilly is jeopardised by the arrival of swaggering French Formula One driver, Sacha Baron Cohen. Siddharth Anand adds some musical pizzazz to the Bollywood saga, Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007), which sees pit crew member Saif Ali Khan get a chance to drive for the Speeding Saddles. But, having made his name in the United States, he's injured in a crash and conspires with wife Rani Mukerji to convince their kids that they are pretending to be poor in a rundown Bronx neighbourhood in order to win a reality TV prize.
Indianapolis and Le Mans
Nicknamed The Brickyard, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was opened in Speedway, Indiana in 1909. The first Indianapolis 500 was held two years later, but it took Hollywood a time to start making regular visits, with William Haines having problems with foster father Ernest Torrence while trying to impress Anita Page on the eve of the Indy 500 in Harry Beaumont's Speedway (1929). James Cagney leapt into the cockpit in Howard Hawks's The Crowd Roars (1932), although his stunt driver was Indy 500 veteran Harry Hartz and the famous race inspired Lloyd Bacon's 1938 remake, Indianapolis Speedway, which put Pat O'Brien behind the wheel. Other Brickyard pictures from this period include Otto Brower's Straightaway (1933) and Road Demon (1938), William Berke's Speed to Spare (1937) and Edwin L Marin's Speedy (1936), which saw a young James Stewart reportedly drive a car named The Falcon at 140mph in his first starring vehicle.
Mickey Rooney plays the son of an Indy 500 legend in Edward Ludwig's The Big Wheel (1949), as he tries to live up to the family name after causing the death of another racer. The Speedway also provided the backdrop for Clarence Brown's To Please a Lady (1950), as columnist Barbara Stanwyck forces Clark Gable to retire from the track after blaming him for a rival's death, and William Beaudine's Roar of the Crowd (1953), in which Howard Duff fights his way back from injury to race again.
Paul Newman was no mean driver himself and took racing so seriously that he formed his own IndyCar team with Bill Freeman in 1976, a decade after he had played Indy 500 driver Frank Capua, who comes to detest rival Luther Erding (Robert Wagner) after he sleeps with his wife, Elora (Joanne Woodward), in James Goldstone's Winning (1966). When driver Kip Pardue needs help to win the Champ Cars title in Renny Harlin's Driven (2001), car owner Burt Reynolds asks old pal Sylvester Stallone to come out of retirement to mentor his challenger.
The Charlotte Motor Speedway provides the backdrop to Steven Soderbergh's heist movie, Logan Lucky (2017), as Channing Tatum aims to break his family's generations-long run of misfortune by committing a race-day robbery with siblings Adam Driver and Riley Keough, wife Katie Holmes and explosives expert Daniel Craig.
Domestic tensions also come to the fore in Ramin Bahrami's At Any Price (2012), as Zac Efron wants to become a professional racing car driver, in spite of Mid-West farmer father Dennis Quaid having other plans. More amusingly, a snail named Theo (Ryan Reynolds) gets sucked into the supercharger of a Chevrolet Camaro drag racer in David Soren's DreamWorks animation, Turbo (2013), and emerges as the fastest mollusc in Los Angeles. Naturally, he enters the Indy 500 and gets to take on his hero, French-Canadian driver Guy Gagné (Bill Hader).
Lee H. Katzin's Le Mans (1971) sees Steve McQueen return to the famous French track a year after many had blamed him for the crash that killed Elga Anderson's husband. Much of the filming was done during the 1970 event and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna recall the shoot in their 2015 documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans. The race will come under the spotlight again in James Mangold's Le Mans '66 (which is also known as Ford v Ferrari ). Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt turned down the leads, but Christian Bale and Matt Damon have already been lauded by the critics for playing British racing driver Ken Miles and American car designer Carroll Shelby, as they prepare the Ford GT40 for its debut during the 1966 race.
Tearing Up the Tarmac
Street racing has become the dominant form of motor action on screen in recent times. Released in 1947, Crane Wilbur's A Devil on Wheels made little impact on audiences. But they were hooked the moment Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) challenged Jim Stark (James Dean) to a 'Chickie Run' in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Numerous copycat flicks followed in short order, including Hot Rod Girl (1956).
Skip Ward is disowned by father Joel Lawrence after causing the crash that kills another driver in Arthur Swerdloff's Roadracers (1959). But the focus shifted on to motorcycles for much of the 1960s, culminating in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969). But hot-rodding returned to the screen during the nostalgia wave sparked by George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973). Speeding along Paradise Road was followed by drag racing at the Fremont Speedway in Bill L. Norton's More American Graffiti (1979) and, staying in the retro groove, John Travolta gets to uphold the honour of the T-Birds against the Scorpions in Greased Lightnin' in Randal Kleiser's Grease (1978).
In Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), which remains one of the greatest road movies made in America, drag racers The Driver (James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) accept the challenge to cross-country race to Washington DC thrown down by GTO (Warren Oates), with the winner being entitled to the loser's car. But exploitation producer Roger Corman took things further in Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 (1975), which was based on Ib Melchior's short story, 'The Racer', and is set in a dystopian new millennium, where David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone compete for extra points by killing pedestrians in the Transcontinental Road Race.
Having reunited with Carradine for Allan Arkush's Deathsport (1978), in which the dictator of Helix City stages motorbike-backed gladiatorial duels for the survivors of the Neutron Wars, Corman returned to the fray with Manu Bennett as the cyborg driver Frankenstein in Death Race 2050 (2017). By this time, a spin-off cycle had been launched by Paul WS Anderson's unofficial prequel, Death Race (2008), in which Jason Statham took over a role once linked with Tom Cruise to race in an event staged by Terminal Island Penitentiary governor Joan Allen for the amusement of a pay-to-view television audience.
So brisk was the box-office business that Roel Reiné signed Luke Goss for Death Race 2 (2010) and Death Race 3: Inferno (2013) before Don Michael Paul put Zach McGowan in the hot seat for Death Race: Beyond Anarchy (2018), which co-starred Danny Trejo as an unscrupulous bookie. Elsewhere, Roy Krynim cashed in on the franchise with Death Racers (2008), which forged an unlikely rivalry between Insane Clown Posse rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope and wrestler Scott 'Raven' Levy.
The streets of Sydney and the nearby town of Cobar provide the setting for the breakneck action in John Clark's Running on Empty (1982), which centres on the rivalry between Terry Serio and Richard Moir. The scene switches to Hong Kong for Gordon Chan's Thunderbolt (1995), as illegal street champion Jackie Chan faces competition from mob-backed drag racer, Thorsten Nickel. The Special Administrative Region is also on show in Wai-keung Lau, Alan Mak and Ralph Rieckermann's Initial D - Drift Racer (2005), which sees Shawn Yue navigate the winding mountain roads while delivering tofu for his father while developing the driving skills that allow him to test himself in the Japanese sport of drift racing.
No street racing movies have made more money or acquired a bigger cult following than those with the Fast and Furious brand. As one might have expected, Roger Corman was behind the first picture to use the title the wronged man chase thriller, The Fast and the Furious (1955), which saw John Ireland direct himself as a fugitive taking Dorothy Malone hostage. It was reappropriated for Rob Cohen's The Fast and the Furious (2001), which saw LAPD cop Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) go undercover to catch a heist gang and become embroiled in the street-racing rivalry between Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Johnny Tran (Rick Yune).
O'Connor has lost his badge by the time he tries to outlaw street racing in John Singleton's 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and he's only seen in archive footage in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), which was the first of four entries to be directed by Justin Lin. Its focus falls on Sean Boswell (Lucas Black), who travels half the world to start a new life, only to find the lure of the chase to be too great. Walker and Diesel were back in the frame as O'Connor and Toretto are drawn into a street race in Fast & Furious (2009) and they challenge each other to a showdown after surviving a brush in Rio de Janeiro with Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) in Fast Five (2011).
Hobbs goes after former SAS major Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), which includes a race between Toretto and his amnesiac wife, Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), as the action shuttles between Moscow, London and Los Angeles. James Wan took over for Fast & Furious 7 (2015), which centres around the efforts of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) to liberate his brother. However, the production was thrown into chaos when Paul Walker was killed as a passenger in a car crash and his brothers Caleb and Cody had to act as stand-ins to complete the shoot.
The emphasis switched to Toretto being led astray by cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) in F. Gary Gray's The Fate of the Furious (2017), which has since been followed by David Leitch's Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (2019), which added Idris Elba and Helen Mirren to the mix, as DSS agent Hobbs re-locks horns with Deckard Shaw. No series with such a high profile could avoid parody, however, and after cartoon icons Tom and Jerry had mocked the series in competing in the Fabulous Super Race in Bill Kopp's The Fast and the Furry (2005), Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer set out to lampoon the Fast and Furious format in Superfast! (2015), which stars Alex Ashbaugh and Dale Pavinski in caricatures of O'Connor and Toretto.
There are several variations on the theme on offer from Cinema Paradiso, including Mike Marvin's The Wraith (1986). Packard Walsh (Nick Cassavetes) has controlled the illegal street races in the town of Brooks, Arizona since the mysterious disappearance of Jamie Hankins (Charlie Sheen). But he returns in the guise of Jake Kesey to exact his revenge and win back grieving girlfriend, Keri Johnson (Sherilyn Fenn). Nadia Bjorlin might have lost her NASCAR father in a crash, but she has speed in her blood and is prepared to compete against Iraq War veteran Nathan Phillips in the races run on the outskirts of Las Vegas by the rich and infamous in Andy Cheng's Redline (2007). Sharing the same title is Takeshi Koike's Redline (2009), an anime set in a future after two interplanetary wars that centres on a race that takes place every five years and sees the reckless Joshua Punkhead falling for and competing against female racer Sonoshee McLaren.
Alex Ranarivelo's Born to Race (2011) sees rebellious street racer Joseph Cross go to live with his onetime NASCAR-driving father, John Pyper-Ferguson, who overcomes his doubts to help his son compete in the National Hot Rod High School Drag. Also, when street racer Aaron Paul does time for manslaughter after an illegal race on the interstate, he seeks revenge on old rival Dominic Cooper during the De Leon supercar rally in Scott Waugh's Need for Speed (2014).
Cinema-goers will soon be able to see Scott Graham put a very British spin on the street-racing phenomenon in Run, in which thirtysomething Bruce Springsteen fan Mark Stanley becomes so bored with working in a Fraserburgh fish factory that he hooks up with son Anders Hayward's pregnant girlfriend, Marli Siu, to relive his wild glory days as a midnight hot-rodder.
Finding the Right Formula
Under the auspices of the Automobile Club de France, the first Grand Prix was held on a triangular track at Le Mans in 1905. It was won by Hungarian Ferenc Szisz in a Renault. Qualifying was introduced at Monaco in 1933, while Formula One racing became the norm after 1949. The world championship for drivers was inaugurated the following year, with Giuseppe Farina taking the title. It's apt, therefore, that Italy should have been at the centre of Terence Fisher's Hammer outing, Mask of Dust (1954), which sees Richard Conte leave the Corsi team and come to Britain to race for manager Peter Illing alongside rising star George Coulouris. But a run of bad luck leaves Conte's future hanging on his performance in the Piedmonte Grand Prix.
As Formula One was largely based in Europe, Hollywood tended to focus on US-based competitions. Nevertheless, Kirk Douglas played a driver who bounces back from a serious crash in Henry Hathaway's The Racers (1955), which was inspired by the career of the German ace, Rudolf Caracciola. British film-makers were more seduced by the glamour of the sport, however, which proved crucial to Ralph Thomas's Checkpoint (1956). When Stanley Baker fails to persuade an Italian designer to work for James Robertson Justice's racing team, he steals the plans for a fuel injection system and is added to the team alongside ace driver Anthony Steel in an effort to smuggle the blueprints back to Blighty.
Always one to spot a potential trend, Roger Corman tapped into the glitz of the Monaco Grand Prix, as daredevil American William Campbell seeks to win by his own rules in The Young Racers (1963). Some of the biggest names in the sport's history lined up alongside James Garner and Yves Montand in John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), which shares its name with a rarely seen 1934 British film by St John Legh Clowes. Filmed in Super Panavision 70 by Lionel Lindon, this is one for the car lover rather than the casual viewer, as the off-track dramas aren't as gripping as they might be. Yet it won Oscars for its editing, sound and sound effects and still looks impressive on a king-size screen.
The expense of staging authentic-looking race meetings has rather steered cinema away from Formula One, although a dearth of plot variation has also limited the narrative options. As a consequence, the sport has often been a starting point for a scenario, as in Sydney Pollack's Bobby Deerfield, which sees Al Pacino play a washed-up Formula One driver given a new lease of life by Marthe Keller; Roger Donaldson's Smash Palace (both 1981), which has Bruno Lawrence return to his native New Zealand to run his father's wrecking yard after surviving a horrendous crash; and Geoff Murphy's dystopic sci-fi fantasy, Freejack (1991), in which Formula One driver Emilio Estevez is about to perish in a track smash when he is whisked into the future and discovers he is being pursued by 'bonejacker' Mick Jagger.
With the right story, stars and budget, the Grand Prix circus can come alive on screen, as was the case with Ron Howard's Rush (2013). Chronicling the fabled mid-1970s rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, this slick picture cast Chris Hemsworth as the blonde Brit driving for McLaren and Daniel Brühl as Ferrari's fiercely competitive Austrian. He is also the subject of Hannes Hannes Michael Schalle's revealing profile, Lauda: The Untold Story (2014), and there are those who believe that Formula One is best presented in the documentary form.
It's hard to argue when one considers masterpieces like Asif Kapadia's Senna (2010), which eschews voice-over narration and talking-head interviews and relies entirely on archive footage and previously unseen home movies to chart Brazilian Ayrton Senna's fabled clashes with Frenchman Alain Prost between the 1984 Brazilian Grand Prix and the tragedy at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. A number of other actualities have focused on the dangerous aspect of the sport, with the pick being Paul Crowder's 1 (2013), which uses track carnage to expose the slow progress that Formula One has made towards reforming its circuits, cars and safety equipment.
For an epic account of the sport, there's no finer starting place than the overview The History of the Grand Prix (2014). But Cinema Paradiso also has several driver studies to choose from, including the ones on Juan Manuel Fangio (2002), Stirling Moss and Graham Hill (both 2013) in the Racing Through Time Legends series. There's also a chance to get to know a couple of doughty Scots in Bruce Cox's Champion: Jim Clark (2002) and Frank Simon and Roman Polanski's Weekend of a Champion (1972) and Mark Craig's Jackie Stewart: The Flying Scot (2001).
While the romance of Formula One is inextricably linked to the action on the track, there are also fascinating stories to be told about life behind the scenes. The pride of Italian motorsport has been the subject of two documentaries, Daryl Goodrich's Ferrari: Race to Immortality and Andrea Marini's Ferrari 312B (both 2017), while the same year saw the release of documentaries about two larger-than-life F1 characters. Morgan Matthews's Williams centres on Sir Frank Williams, who survived a high-speed crash to build a team that went on to win the Constructors' Championship on nine occasions, while Roger Donaldson's McLaren focuses on New Zealander Bruce McLaren, whose achievements on the track were surpassed by those in the garage, as he developed one of the most successful teams in the history of the sport.
Motor racing has always been a pastime for mavericks. So, it's fitting we end this survey by flagging up the efforts of Australian actor Eric Bana and three of his childhood buddies, who have spent 25 years renovating a Ford GT Falcon Coupe. When they decide to enter it in the gruelling Targa Tasmania Rally, they turn for advice to Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame. See how they get on in Bana's rousing 2009 documentary, Love the Beast.
For more adrenaline-filled car action, you might want to check out The Best Car Chase Films collection!
