THE MOVIES THAT GET IT RIGHT
Movies about cars have had mixed success. Steve McQueen’s Le Mans sounds like a beautiful idea, but it just didn’t work on screen. James Garner in Grand Prix is better, if a bit daft, the actors all pursing their lips and narrowing their eyes to get an extra 5 mph to overtake each other. The modern classics are Bullitt and Vanishing Point, but they don’t really work for me.
Then there’s Herbie, the VW Beetle with a heart. The first one was cute, then the films just got boring as the original idea ran out of ideas. Bonnie and Clyde is canny, with all the car chases and Faye Dunaway trying to get Clyde to shag her—what was wrong with him? How about Where Eagles Dare, with Richard Burton driving that red Alpine bus and getting chased on the mountain roads? Brilliant stuff! And Laurel and Hardy’s Model T that just fell apart as they drove off? John Cleese, in Fawlty Towers, beating the crap out of a 1100 Estate, shouting, “You vicious bastard, start!” is still the funniest moment for me. I know how he feels. I’ve had cars like that, and it does get personal.
The Great Race is another cracking movie that has great characters in it and makes me laugh. Then there’s Monte Carlo or Bust with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Terry-Thomas, all brilliant, and the great Eric Sykes playing Perkins the Butler—doing Terry-Thomas’s dirty work. I even saw Graham Hill in it. The same people brought us Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, with a lot of the same characters. I watch these movies about once a month to get my fix.
Duel was an early movie directed by a young lad called Steven Spielberg and had no script as such, just a story about a car being chased by a dirty big truck with “Evil” written all over it. It was a gas tanker, rusty as a sailor’s balls, and you never saw the driver—this is a cool movie. It still keeps me on the edge of my seat.
AC/DC did the soundtrack for a movie called Maximum Overdrive, by Stephen King. The film was about all things engined taking over the world. We flew to the Bahamas to record it at Compass Point Studio, where we’d done Back in Black. And there to meet us was Stephen King himself, who both wrote and directed the film, and Dino De Laurentiis, the producer. We saw the rushes and came up with the song “Who Made Who,” which still rocks. Stephen liked it, but Dino couldn’t stand it, which is just as well, because we couldn’t stand him. It was about 85 degrees outside, and he arrived at the studio with his coat draped over his shoulders, dark glasses, and the obligatory starlet . . . Mind you, she did have lovely titties. The movie wasn’t really a success. In fact, it hardly saw the light of day. But now it has a cult following and no, that’s not a typo—I did mean “cult.”
Genevieve, I think, is a perfect time-capsule movie, made in the fifties, in England, in color. It was all about the London to Brighton Run in cars from before the First World War (or thereabouts). John Gregson and Kenneth More play the leads, with two English roses for company. Of course, it’s all impossibly proper and nobody gets really angry. They say things like “Oh, that rotten blighter” instead of “I hope your next shit’s a hedgehog.” The cars were gorgeous, and I drooled when I saw it as a kid at the Top Hall Cinema in Dunston. (My mother would not let us go to the Bottom Hall, because the men’s toilet was always ankle-deep in pee and you’d walk in there and squelch out. There was definitely a nutty smell in there.) The music for Genevieve, by Larry Adler, a harmonica player from way back, is the only thing that grates—apart from the cars’ gearboxes. Give it a watch—it’s dead easy on the mind and the eye.
School for Scoundrels is not a movie about cars, but it’s the cars that steal the movie: Terry-Thomas’s Bellini and Ian Carmichael’s Swiftmobile. Alastair Sim also stars in this must-see movie about one-upmanship. My favorite part is when Ian Carmichael’s character, Henry Palfrey, goes into a car showroom called “The Winsome Welshmen” to buy a car.
Dudley Dorchester (a salesman): “She takes the eye, doesn’t she, sir?”
Palfrey: “She certainly does. Can I hear the horn?”
Dudley Dorchester: “Gentleman wants to hear the horn, Dunstan.”
Dunstan Dorchester (another salesman): “Of course he can.”
Palfrey hits the horn and a noise like a whole troop of Coldstream Guards farting at the same time roars out. However, on the second go, it sounds more like a squad of snails farting. Dunstan rallies immediately: “I’ve got a temporary flex in there. It’s an old type of exhaust horn that runs on helical friction—way too complicated to explain. You either know or you don’t.” The sweetest bullshit I’ve ever heard.
It’s a wonderful film, very funny, and we still talk about it in the band. “Hard cheese!” was Terry’s line in a tennis match with Carmichael. Listen: buy it, watch it, it’s priceless. Well, that’s not entirely true—it has Dennis Price in it, too.
So, all in all, cars and movies are a bit hitty-missy. Usually, if it’s a film about cars, it doesn’t go so well, but if it’s a movie with great cars in it, sometimes it does. I guess it’s like turning sixty—every fart’s a fifty-fifty.
My favorite car film of all time is The Fast Lady, starring Stanley Baxter, Leslie Phillips, James Robertson Justice, and a gorgeous young Julie Christie. But the main star is a 1930s Sports 34-50 Bentley. Phillips is the used-car salesman trying to get tight-fisted Scotsman Baxter to buy it in order to impress Christie. It is hilarious, as is the line “We used-car salesmen have our honor, you know.” When he sees Julie Christie for the first time, Phillips comes out with the immortal words: “Ding, dong!” James Robertson Justice is the girl’s pompous father who won’t let Stanley take her on a date unless he proves he can drive the Bentley correctly (he used to race them at Brooklands). The scenes of this beautiful car getting mixed up in hill-climbing and chasing bank robbers are so well done that it kinda blows out the window my theory about car movies being so-so. You must buy this movie: it is so well shot you can almost smell the leather and engine oil. And oh yeah, he gets the girl!