Jack Watson, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Bedford - WHY?

My opinion on the points you raise:

1. Piecing the bits of info we get about Pete Aron in the script, he starts his career in 1960 and by 1961 he's at Ferrari as #2 to Jean-Pierre Sarti. He stays at Ferrari for another 2 seasons, winning a total of 5 grand prix, when he realises he's never going to be #1 and favoured over Sarti, so he leaves and joins Jordan's BRM team. It's said that in his last few seasons, Aron has become accident prone and too much of a risk taker, wrecking cars in the process.

So Jordan hired a proven grand prix winner at first but over the 3 seasons at BRM, their working and personal relationship had deteriorated. Compared with Jordan's golden boy, Scott Stoddard, Aron is a complainer who breaks cars by taking risks that Jordan thinks are reckless. So by the start of the 1966 season, Jordan's pretty much at the end of his tether but probably Aron is still under contract or else he's giving Pete one last chance. Getting involved in a shunt that is partly Aron's fault (even though people at the post-race party say that blocking Scott was ungentlemanly, but within the rules) was the last straw, especially as Jordan sees Stoddard as his ticket to the world championship. The character of Jeff Jordan is partly an amalgam of Raymond Mays, the owner of the real BRM, and Colin Chapman from Lotus, who could be volatile and play favourites with his drivers.

2. I can't really counter your point as it's a personal take on Eve Marie Saint's performance. To each their own. However, in the 60s and the advent of living reporting (also called Gonzo in some circles), it wasn't unusual for a reporter to spend months, or even a year on a grand story if the scope was wide enough. I had a copy of National Geographic that followed a Grand Prix season from about 1965 so someone had to have spent nearly a year on that one.

3. Brian Bedford was chosen, in part, because he bears an uncanny resemblance to Jim Clark. Frankenheimer said that the four principle actors looked like racing drivers. Yves Montand's Jean-Pierre Sarti is a combination of Juan Manuel Fangio (he even bears a slight resemblance) and Wolfgang Von Trips (who's accident in real life was the model for Sarti's). Stoddard was a combination of Jim Clark and Stirling Moss. Nino Barlini is based on John Surtees and Lorenzo Bandini. James Garner is a combination of Phil Hill, Dan Gurney and outsiders who took on the odds like Jack Brabham. In the movie, Stoddard comes across as this gentleman racer who has absorbed himself in his racing to the point that he's lost contact with those close to him. When he gets home after his Monte Carlo accident, he goes up to his brother's old room and sits there...shutting out his own family. It's an understated part, but a lot of Bedford's pain is shown in his eyes and not his words.

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I read in an old Time Magazine article that the idea for Eva's storyline came from a female journalist from Vogue who did infact follow the entire season to write about it.

Jack Watson: I agree there should have been a little more explanation on Aron and Jordan. Was he abusing the cars? Was he over-aggressive and crashed a lot? Not the actor's fault, more of the scriptwriter. They could have cut out the love triangle and filled in more of the gaps.

Eva Marie Saint: I couldn't believe how she went from stunning in North by Northwest to average in this movie. She was overblown. But her character is important to get an outsiders approach to racing.

Brian Bedford: AWFUL! Couldn't drive and he was a pretty wooden actor. Choosing an actor because he looked like other driver(s) was pretty weak. They should have found another actor to take the job. Robert Shaw, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, someone from the UK could have played that role better.

1. Nothing unusual in Formula 1. Ron Dennis hired Juan-Pablo Montoya for McLaren in 2005, and thanks to Montoya's reckless antics they missed a well-deserved constructors' title that year. He gave him another shot in 2006, but their relation deteriorated and Montoya "left" mid-season and was replaced by the test-driver.
Nigel Mansell was world champion in 1992, then CART champion in 1993 and won the final race of the 1994 season. For 1995 he was signed by McLaren, which was surprising since Ron Dennis was known to dislike Mansell's refusal to accept any mistakes as his own, and rather passing the blame. Mansell lasted 2 races, in 1 he was lapped by his team mate, future world champion Mika Hakkinen. Had Ron Dennis been able to speak openly in public I have little doubt he'd use the same words Jeff Jordan used when he fired Pete Aron.

I don't see how this is a problem. It is clear Jeff Jordan sees Scott Stoddard as his golden boy, who will snatch the title from Sarti's hands. Pete Aron on the other hand always seems to have car problems, and a driver who wrecks gearboxes and it's likely not even the mechanics of the BRM team put much effort into keeping his car in top trim.
Jordan probably sees Pete Aron as a good driver to bring the constructors' title too, and to back-up Stoddard by not letting Sarti or Barlini challenge him too often. This is why he tells Aron to get a "good start of the season" by bringing home good points at least, and not trying to challenge for the win.

Aron IS a bit of bad team player and after getting beaten by Sarti in Ferrari he ends up getting beaten by Stoddard in the BRM too. For this reason he refuses to let Stoddard lap him, and even gets the blue flag angrily waved at him. When he later seeks a drive for Ferrari, Manetta naturally doesn't want the same to happen to his precious Ferrari's as Aron did to BRM.
Yamura hires him because he knows Aron is capable of wins, despite being an erratic driver, unlike his regular drivers who would be happy to see the podium. Later Yamura learns Aron is still reckless and does mistakes. Even a still not fully healed Stoddard is beating him in the races, so Yamura sits down and tries to understand why he makes these mistakes.

"You're never halfway home!" Well, in racing any driver that THINKS he is halfway home might start to drive like it's a leisure drive on the countryside and start cruising, thus losing his concentration. Also, racing isn't like driving a car home from a vacation where being "halfway" home is almost a certainty. In racing drivers have been known to retire in the last laps, so just mentioning the words "I am halfway home" is as stupid and ignorant you could possibly be in racing. This is why Jeff Jordan gets so angry and rebukes Aron's casual comment as if he is riding home in a bus and not driving in a sport in which nothing is certain until you cross the finish line.

I won't bother with those other 2 since they are mostly nitpicking with a few good points. FYI, Jim Clark wasn't a very entertaining guy in private either, he wasn't like Graham Hill.

I agree with those here who saw Jordan's exasperation as related to their having a past history. Jordan doesn't feel compelled to encouragr Aron to wins because of two things, one being that he really wanted Stoddard to, and the other is that he didn't really see Aron as having a good shot at winning, anyway.

The logic of a two car team in F1, particularly back then, was not one where both teams were seen as equal entrants. The relative degrees of hope the team might have for performance of the second car might vary, but what are somewhat provocatively referred to as "team orders" has been a reality in F1 for a long time. (Perhaps less so now than in the sixties.) By team orders is meant that one team is intended to be treated as the better hope for wins and the championship. Where appropriate, during the race, the second team's driver was expected to defer to the first team.

By that logic, Aron was a poor choice for BRM. He was not temperamentally suited to be the second driver. Having him in that role, for contract reasons, because he still was one of the better drivers, whatever the particulars were in terms of why he was at the start of the 66 season BRM's number 2, you could tell Jordan was not happy at having to deal with that set of circumstances. It make sense to me.

Eva Marie Saint. Personally I think while she is older here than in her fifties classic roles, she is still absolutely gorgeous, and so I beg off having any objective view of her. I think fwiw that her role was one of a rather nervous type under her self assured surface veneer. This was in terms of the story itself compounded by her own ambivalence about racing, present from the beginning of her presence in the film. Her doubts as expressed in her first talking with Sarti in the museum in Monte Carlo were not really resolved, either by what Sarti said or by their growing romance. Yet there she sits in the stands at Clermont Ferrand, excited by the experience as well as rooting for her new possible romantic partner to succeed. Complicated emotions, i think, that are shown in her role to have a certain nervous effect.

Her reaction to Sarti's death I think was meant to be painful to watch. The makers of this film did not attempt to whitewash the risks, even the foolishness of such risktaking. Perhaps they went overboard in balancing the emphasis on the excitement of the sport. But I am certain Frankenheimer felt Saint played the scene just as he wanted.

That doesn't mean some viewers will feel differenty about it, but after all, was it unrealistic for her to be distraught? EVen unhinged? I think not.

Bedford. I think his emotional flatness was also intended. He was trying to hide from others what his wife thoroughly knew about him, as she described in her bedside goodbye encounter, in the Monte Carlo hospital. His flatness served as a mask. Bedford played the role as intended.

I do not agree with another posters assessment that this was not Arons first season with BRM. In the opening sequence the announcer clearly states that Aron is "NOW" driving for BRM, as if he were new to the team. I believe there was an unnamed team between Ferrari and BRM or the announcer would not have said it like that. It clearly seemed to me like this was his first race and his owner already hated him. The tirade calling him a liar and a coward seemed to make no sense at all.

I'm not sure that I totally agree with you on EMS. I thought she handled the ending well, the blood on her hands for the reporters being very appropriate. She was afterall bassically a newcomer to the sport still, and not yet as accustomed to death as most of the participants and spouses had to be back then, and this was her lover. Auto racing was truly a blood sport back then. It's almost amazing the risks the drivers were willing to take. Today's drivers should pray towards Jackie Stewart's house each and every time before they step into a race car.

I didn't really think Stoddard had a morbid attachment to his dead brother, I thought he explained himself well as wanting to shoot to be as good as Roger was, and the trophies were his reminder of that, especially the two F1 championship trophies on the mantle.

And I cannot agree that Walter was anywhere near decent in this.

The first few seconds we see of her as hungover was some of the worst acting I have ever seen. If that was the best they could do with that they should have figured a different way to introduce her. After that there was little that could redeem her effort.

She just did not seem believable as a racing wife to me.


I wonder why they were not allowed to use Enzo Ferrari's name as the Commendatore? I would have though Enzo would have loved that, he certainly never cared that it was being porttrayed as a blood sport, he said that was why he painted the cars red so it wouldn't show anyway.


I love open wheel racing racing too. I have been to the 92, 93 and 94 Canadian GPs, the 93 Australian GP (Somewhat ironically in the context of this movie Sennas last win before his death) and the 05 debacle at Indy, as well as the 06 and 07 Indy 500s, plus more sprint car races than I could ever hope to count.




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