Big Prize

Once again, TCM has a pair of movies coming up in close succession that are on my DVR and that I haven't posted about. So one of them is going to get a post a good day and a half before it shows up on TCM. That movie is Grand Prix, which TCM has on at 2:30 AM on May 21 (so still just before midnight May 20 in the Pacific time zone).

Now, with a movie with a title like Grand Prix, you'd expect it to have a climactic scene set at the big car race, and in fact you'd be right. What's slightly more surprising, however, is that the movie opens up at a car race, the Monaco Grand Prix. Even more surprising is that this isn't a plot device where the movie opens up near the end and then goes into flashback. It is, however, an effective way of introducing the audience to the main characters, or at least the drivers:

Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand) drives for Ferrari, one of the big names in Grand Prix racing. He's the sort of older champion, and the stand-in for Continental tradition.
The UK was a big player in Grand Prix at the time as well, so they have a top driver in the form of Scott Stoddard (Brian Bedford), representing the sort of "England may be different from the Continent, but the way we do things is right" mentality.
And, since this is a Hollywood movie, you need an American, who is also of course the shorthand for a brash up-and-comer who does things his way, which might not be what the "sophisticated" Europeans like. That racer is Pete Aron, played by James Garner.

Monaco is a notoriously tight racetrack, nowadays with limited opportunities for passing, since it's right in the middle of a ridiculously crowded city. And, since this is a car racing movie, it's unsurprising that there's a big crash, since those are cinematically more interesting than just cars going around in loops. It's Scott and Pete who get into a crash, with the result that Pete loses his driver's spot in the championship while Scott ends up badly injured enough that he may have to retire. An American journalist, Louise Frederickson (Eva Marie Saint), there to do an article, can't comprehend why Jean-Pierre and the other uninjured drivers take a sang-froid attitude to it all.

But Louise winds up becoming interested enough in the sport that she has an affair with Jean-Pierre, even though he's already married to a woman who is never going to grant him a divorce, because not granting your unahppy spouse a divorce is one of the most original plot devices in movie history. Almost as original as the flashback. And it's not the only affair in the movie, as Pete starts seeing Scott's wife Pat (Jessica Walter), who was never particularly thrilled with her husband driving a race car.

Pete stars working as a color commentator for one of the US broadcasters, but there's another upstart about to enter the picture: Japanese car constructor Yamura (Toshiro Mifune), who is wealthy enough to think about entering a third car into Formula 1. With that in mind, he offers Pete a second chance at driving.

One more driver enters the picture, the new European Nino (Antonio Sabato), who is the second driver for Ferrari. And then to make matters more interesting, Scott "recovers" from his injury, at least enough for his crew to pick him up and put him in the car which he can drive. All four men wind up close to each other in the points race going into the final race, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, a race track which was apparently notoriously fast.

To be honest, the story in Grand Prix is little more than serviceable, largely because it's tough to be original with car racing movies. All the tropes have been done to death. What is, however, more original about Grand Prix, is that they were able to get on the real race tracks and get real footage from Forumla 1 drivers as well as the sort of sports car that would do races like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and could be repurposed to drive enough laps on the Forumla 1 circuits to get useful footage. This is an era of Formula 1 that was much more dangerous than today (I'm not much of a fan of car racing but the people I know who are Formula 1 fans tend to think of today's racing as little more than a procession). That, and many of the tracks are either no longer used or used in very different configurations today.

If you like auto racing, especially if you're into vintage cars, I think you'll love Grand Prix.

To Please a Lady

Another of the movies that I've had sitting on my DVR for a couple of months is To Please a Lady. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, the camera focuses on a poster advertising "Regina Forbes, America's Leading Woman Columnist". Forbes is played by Barbara Stanwyck, and she's in the office with her editor, Gregg (Adolphe Menjou). They're watching a TV promo about Mike Brannan (Clark Gable), a racecar driver who drives all sorts of cars to make a living. The promo points out that he's become successful, but he's also now the villain because he'll do anything to win, not that they had the word kayfabe in those days. In any case, Gregg thinks Brannon would be a perfect person for Regina to do her next column on.

Regina and Gregg go out to Newark to the midget car track where Brannan is racing this week. Brannan is good and knows it, and as a result treats Regina with all the respect he deserves, which is not much but also about as much as he'd give to any writer not already in the racing world. It's an attitude that turns Regina off to Brannan. She and Gregg stay in the stands to watch the race, which is rather an eventful one. Brannon and another driver are in a fight for the lead, having lapped other cars that are much slower. In an attempt to lap another car, there's enough of an accident that Brannan's rival crashes off the track, eventually dying from his injuries. Regina is ruthless in her column, and Brannan finds that he's unable to race anywhere.

Some time later, Gregg reads a newspaper article mentioning how Brannan has been blackballed from racing, and is now a trick driver at the sort of traveling carnival that, a generation earlier, would have featured stunt pilots who would have been lionized in early talkies. Regina feigns disinterest, but you get the feeling she was so turned on by Brannan's bad boy act back in Newark that she just has to go to the carnival when it shows up in the New York area. Not only that, but she goes over to see Brannan after the show even though he seems to be pursuing one of the women working in the carnival.

Regina is clearly falling for Brannan, although he certainly doesn't return the favor at first. And he's got good reason to be pissed at her. But he thinks he's finally earned enough money to try to get back into racing, and this time big time racing as in the Indianapolis 500, which was the Great American Race back in thos days. But you know that eventually Brannan is going to thaw and start having feelings of his own for Regina.

It takes some time as Brannan goes back up the ranks, and Regina is also forced to re-examine herself when another person she wrote a nasty column about decides to commit suicide rather than face a prison sentence resulting from one of Regina's poison-pen columns. Brannan and Regina may finally be able to accept each other for who they are, but the relationship is going to have to survive Brannan's attempt to win the Indy 500.

I've mentioned in the past how I think MGM was quite good at doing literary adaptions and costume dramas. However, there were certain genres they weren't as good at, and To Please a Lady falls squarely into that latter half. It doesn't help that the movie was made in 1950. Gable and Stanwyck were both much too old for their roles, Gable in particular. Plus, tastes were changing after World War II and To Please a Lady feels a lot like the sort of auto racing movie that would have been done in the pre-war years. The script also doesn't do any of the stars any favors.

To Please a Lady may be of interest to fans of either Clark Gable or Barbara Stanwyck, but it's not a terribly good film.