A movie for every day of the year – a good one
18 February
Enzo Ferrari born, 1898
On this day in 1898, Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was born. The man who would later be known as Il Commendatore, founder and leader of the Ferrari racing team (and car manufacturer) was taken to a racing track as a kid and realised immediately that he wanted to be a driver. By the early 1920s he was Alfa Romeo’s test driver, and when the company decided to outsource their racing unit, it was Ferrari that ran it. He went solo during the Second World War, during which time Alfa paid him not to compete, and by the end of the war was ready with his first car, the game-changing 125, a two-seated GT car that became the basis for Ferrari’s first vehicle when the new fangled Formula 1 launched. Unlike other manufacturers, who see race cars as a testbed for road car production, Ferrari was never that interested in road cars, and saw them largely as a way of defraying the huge expense of racing. He stayed true to his first love, even after he sold 50 per cent of the company to Fiat in 1969, remaining totally in control of the racing side of things right up to his death in 1988, aged 90.
Rush (2013, dir: Ron Howard)
A thrilling, period-perfect and beautifully written film about the rivalry between Englishman James Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda, whose duelling on the track came to a head in the 1976 Formula 1 season. The fact that Rush exists at all, on this scale at least, must in large part be down to Senna, the 2010 documentary about the rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost which had turned out to be a surprise hit. Sportscar racing – a graveyard for film-makers since actor Steve McQueen busted himself with Le Mans – actually could sell cinema tickets it seemed.
In the personalities of Hunt and Lauda director Ron Howard and writer Peter Morgan have chosen well. Hunt’s skills as a driver were debatable – he wasn’t called Hunt the Shunt for nothing – but he had flair and it can’t be denied that he was a good looking man. Cut to the two opening scene that set the tone for the whole film and we have Lauda in voiceover explaining that Formula 1 in the 1970s is deadly (“Each year 25 drivers line up on the start line for Formula 1. Each year, two of us die.”) Cut to Hunt standing in the doorway of a hospital accident room, racesuit unzipped to the waist, looking up through his eyelashes at a weak-kneed nurse like a Greek god out for a good time. Hunt is played by Chris Hemsworth, who nails the drawling British goodtime Charlie accent, while Daniel Brühl does the harder job of bottling Lauda, a tactician, a technician, a driving genius. Rush’s skill is to tell the story of that year – when Lauda crashed and literally burned, allowing Hunt a chance to steal the driver’s championship – without letting the facts get in the way of a good story. So we have the girls and the glory, the gladiatorial joust of driving at the edge of a car’s (and a human’s) abilities, and most of all the rivalry between two very different types of human beings – the grasshopper and the ant, as Aesop would have said. Who was the better driver?
The film is generous to Hunt though it’s obvious that it was Lauda. It’s Ron Howard’s best film – big, thrilling, funny, intelligent, atmospheric and pretty much faultlessly made. And, having learnt the lesson from history, Howard doesn’t make the mistake of so many other race films – there isn’t actually that much track action.
Why Watch?
- Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, both perfect
- 1970s hedonism perfectly conjured
- Doesn’t shy away from the fact that F1 was a brutal, deadly sport
- Olivia Wilde, just one among a standout cast
Rush – at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2014
