The Great Race (1965) on Netflix
Approved19652h 40mActionAdventureComedy
At the turn of the century, daredevil Leslie Gallant III proposes a New York to Paris automobile race. His rival Professor Fate enters, and reporter Maggie DuBois joins the field.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/1021,822 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Leslie Gallant III, known as the Great Leslie, is a daredevil who performs his feats in white and always comes out on top, while his rival Professor Fate, dressed in black, never manages to outdo him. Leslie proposes to the Webber Motor Car Company that it build a car for a race from New York to Paris, running west over the Bering Strait and through Russia; the result is the Leslie Special. Fate enters his own machine, the Hannibal Twin-8, fitted with hidden devices of sabotage. A New York newspaper also sponsors a car, driven by the photojournalist and suffragist Maggie DuBois. Leslie's valet Hezekiah Sturdy rides with him.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Great Race (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Blake Edwards based the film, very loosely, on the 1908 New York to Paris Race. The "Greatest Auto Race" began on February 12, 1908 with six entrants starting in New York City and racing westward across three continents to Paris, making it the first around-the-world automobile race.
- Edwards wanted Robert Wagner to play the leading man, but studio executive Jack L. Warner insisted on Curtis, possibly because of Natalie Wood's recent divorce from Wagner.
- Money could not persuade Natalie Wood to take the part: "I couldn't give her anything to make her want to do the movie." Instead, Warner promised that if she completed The Great Race she could star in Gavin Lambert's drama Inside Daisy Clover, a role she greatly wished to have, and Wood agreed, thinking filming would be brief.
- Julie Andrews was first approached for the role of Maggie DuBois and, admiring Edwards's work, wanted to do it, but was forced to bow out due to delays on The Sound of Music. She eventually married Edwards and acted in several of his films.
- Edwards used 4,000 pies over five days, many of them as set dressing for continuity, while Laurel and Hardy used 3,000 pies in only one day. Leonard Maltin judged the older film's pacing far superior and said the modern one suffered from an "incomplete understanding of slapstick".
- The pie fight threw 4,000 pies, the most ever filmed in such a scene. It lasts four minutes and 20 seconds and cost US$200,000 to shoot, US$18,000 of that just for the pastry.
- Jack Lemmon said "a pie hitting you in the face feels like a ton of cement". At the end of shooting, when Edwards called "cut!", he was barraged with several hundred pies that members of the cast had hidden, waiting for the moment.
