Grand Prix (1966)

I really liked Yves Montand in Grand Prix. He's so great. James Garner, Toshiro Mifune, Eva Marie Saint, and Antonio Sabàto are great too. This is also brilliantly edited and shot – in Cinerama, which allows for all kinds of strange combination shots, like two thirds of the screen a race and one third of the screen an entirely other scene. It's just wonderfully put together.

And, after all, it's a car-racing movie, and so one has a kind of intense reaction to winning and rooting for one's favorite that one has in any sports movie.

Garner does his usual stoic man's-man thing here, and it works well enough, although I think much of his charm is lost on my by 1966. Still, he is humanized well by Jessica Walter and by Mifune.

Overall Grand Prix is a fun movie dressed up as an epic. But Frankenheimer makes a great film, and I still liked it better than Ford v. Ferrari. The racing footage is comparable but Grand Prix's downtime was so much more interesting.