Le Mans

LE MANS (1971) - May 3, 2004
A bad movie. An ordeal. Why Steve McQueen would be in this, I have no idea. I guess it was an easy paycheck. I doubt that he had more than ten minutes of screentime, and no more than a dozen lines of dialogue. The one good part - and there was only one - was a brief scene in which Steve McQueen explains to his ex-girlfriend (or ex-wife) why racing is worth the risk. But that scene was no longer than a couple of minutes and the movie was almost two hours. I'm really not sure who this movie is supposed to appeal to. Fans of the actual race? But it doesn't really show any behind-the-scenes action someone like that might find interesting. The majority of the movie is simply the race itself, presented in a dull TV-style and without an announcer, making the whole thing pointless and confusing. The first fourty minutes of the movie are dialogue-free, filled with random shots of nameless people setting up the race. The race starts, but since there are no real characters, even if I could tell what was going on I wouldn't have cared. There's probably a total of five minutes of dialogue in the whole movie. If that. Here's what I don't get: a movie like this is allowed to be made, and probably had a reasonably big budget, and yet Orson Welles was forced to toil in obscurity for most of his career, scraping money together by appearing in commercials for frozen peas. What's up with that? 1/2*