The Great Race (DVD Review)

This is one of the three 60’s comedies I play when I want a good laugh. Unlike Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines or Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies it does not really have an international cast, and is clearly a satire of movie stereotypes. It was based (very loosely) on a real event, an auto race from New York to Paris via Alaska.

In the real race, the first car to Alaska made it to Alaska via steamboat and was stopped by mud, not drifting sea ice. (Having driven the south end of the Richardson highway even after its paving, and knowing that there is still no summer overland access to Nome, where the cars were supposed to cross the sea ice to Siberia, I find it incredible that cars actually finished. The race was rerouted after the first car found the Alaskan “roads” impassible to allow steamship passage to Asia.) The geography of the movie makes no sense at all, especially drifting across the Pacific on an ice floe.

The movie version features three principal characters, all extreme stereotypes. Tony Curtis plays the Hero, the Great Leslie (cheers!) always in spotless white, with sparkling eyes and teeth, always succeeding in his daredevil stunts. Jack Lemmon is the mustachioed villain Professor Fate (boos and hisses), always wearing black, always failing in his daredevil stunts, and hating The Great Leslie. Natalie Wood is the suffragette newspaper reporter Maggie DuBois (wolf whistles) determined to cover the race start to finish, even if it means planting herself on one or the other (she switches off) of the contestants.

The hero and villain have sidekicks, of course. The Great Leslie’s is Horatio, a strong, silent, mechanical genius who is very much not impressed by Maggie. Professor Fate’s is Max, whose loyalty is somewhat surprising under the circumstances and whose obedience all too often leads to disaster.

The movie is full of things that, like cartoons, seem reasonable but are not — like the rocket-propelled railway carriage that goes so fast it starts flying. Or the “iceberg” that stays comfortably horizontal. I still wonder how the director managed to have the polar bear climb into Professor’s Fate’s car.

I think my favorite scene (though it’s difficult to choose just one) is the great and carefully choreographed pie fight. Choreographed? How else can you explain how The Great Leslie’s clothing stays spotlessly white in the midst of cream pies flying in all directions?

This is by no means a serious film, but it’s still wonderful satire.

Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies: DVD Review

This is a sequel to Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, but it is in some ways a flawed sequel. Not that it doesn’t have its moments – I can never stop myself from laughing at the sequence where two of the cars in the Monte Carlo Rally take a wrong turning and land in the middle of a winter sports area. Suffice it to say that cars do not mix well with curling, hockey, skiing and bobsled runs.

The villain, again played by Terry-Thomas, is Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage, the son and heir of the late (and unlamented by his son) Sir Percy of Magnificent Men. Sir Cuthbert of course expects to get the Ware-Armitage auto factory on his father’s death, but finds to his shock that his father lost half the factory to an American efficiency expert, played by Tony Curtis. The American can’t see beyond the end of his nose without glasses, but he’s vain enough of his appearance to take them off at the most inappropriate times – and he, of course, is the hero to oppose Sir Cuthbert’s dastardly deeds.

The two make a bet: full control of the factory goes to whichever finishes ahead in the Monte Carlo Rally. Other teams include a pair of British officers from the Khyber Pass (read mad inventor,) a pair of escaped convicts (forced to use the Rally to smuggle jewels,) a couple of Italian policemen (one wants to be Cassanova,) and a doctor and two medical students (all female.)

A somewhat flawed sequel? In two ways. First, in Magnificent Men the airplanes, carefully reconstructed from the original blueprints, were characters in their own right. That is not true in this film. The automobiles differ from each other, but for the most part they are pretty tame compared with the demoiselle and the Antoinette airplanes, or Sir Percy’s triplane. (Not to mention some of the crazier planes from the era.)

The second involves the female team. They are totally inconsistent in how they are portrayed. First they show up as “women drivers,” running nurses with baby carriages off the sidewalk and chatting nonstop. Then they are competent drivers and capable of outwitting the Italian drivers in several ways. Then the doctor who leads them is essentially raped by one of the Italian drivers – and responds by falling in love with him. Then she forfeits the race to use her medical skills when needed in an emergency.

The other characters are silly and stereotyped, but they are consistent throughout the film. The women’s team, and especially the doctor who leads it, seem to have split personalities of awesome dimensions.

Of course the whole movie is to a large extent inconsistent with reality. The opening sequence, involving the delivery of a letter to the British officers in the Khyber pass, involves (1) a mountainous desert, (2) a jungle with chimpanzees, (3) swimming an elephant across a crocodile-infested river, and (4) finally a desert again, is a funny bit of satire of the British occupation of India, but a totally screwed up piece of geography.

If you like slapstick comedy, this movie has plenty. But it is not up with Those Magnificent Men.