The Green Helmet

Although it sounds like the sort of film an anonymous sounding government department might release to educate the public about a particularly nasty type of sexually communicable disease, THE GREEN HELMET is, in fact, a rather ordinary flick about motor racing; while not exactly earth-shattering, it has to be said that the movie is nowhere near as unpleasant as the aforementioned disease. The storyline is strictly second rate and rarely manages to grab the attention, while those characters marked for tragic ends are obvious from the outset. The racing scenes are quite well-filmed (for the time – there's none of the one/two second cross-cutting that would be used today to crank up the suspense) and there are a couple of effective crash scenes, but we have to spend far too long on the test track before getting down to the real nitty-gritty. The use of real-life racing drivers, while perhaps boosting audience figures in the early sixties, adds little to the film now, as they are mostly names long since forgotten to anyone without an interest in motor-racing.

This movie still crops up on British TV from time to time. Watched it just yesterday in fact. A goof not mentioned before is when the twin headlamp racing car crashes. As it rolls over and off the track, it suddenly becomes a single headlamp model! A passable film, but obviously very dated now. It is useful of course to those who are interested in motor racing history. Some good shots of the famous marques close up, and a rare appearance by the legendary Jack Brabham. Nostalgic memories stirred by names like Hillman, Singer, Humber, Sunbeam advertised around the Siverstone track. Never quite understood how Bill Travers did so well in his career. Always seemed a bit wooden to me. Script calls for Sid James to use the Aussie word 'Sport' in almost every sentence, which gets a bit boring.

Nancy Walters is one strange actress, huh? She's American playing an American but employs a quite good Brit accent throughout. If this were a halfway decent film I'd either ignore it or maybe make a note of it in passing. But in dreck like this such eccentricities tend to assume undue importance.

The movie is about an old race driver, Greg, who can't get a ride with a factory team, but has a tire manufacturer, Bartel, who is interested in hiring him to test tires. Greg's Aussie buddy is building his own car, but needs financing so Greg gets Bartel to get the car for his tests, with side stories involving Bartel's daughter and hassles with his mother and brother about who should be participating in the racing. The most glaring error in the movie is our heroes wanting to run in the Mille Miglia. The movie opens with scenes from the 1960 Lemans, and other years blended in. So obviously the movie was in the current moment of the time it was made. The last Mille Miglia was run in 1957, so our gang would have needed a "Way-Back" machine to even see one. I guess the book the movie is based on was written in 1955 and the story had some relevance. But in 1961, the story's venue needed to be changed to maybe the Nurburgring 1000Km or the Targa Florio.

THE GREEN HELMET is an entertaining film for auto racing devotees, but might not be of more than passing interest to anyone else. I viewed the film when it was released in the United States in 1961, and found it engrossing. Unfortunately, it is rarely shown on television and is not available (as far as I know) on video media. I have not seen it since its original theatrical run. The story involves the testing of newly designed racing tires, and includes the obligatory romantic subplot between the driver hired to do the testing and the daughter of the tire manufacturer. The most notable feature of the film is the pioneering use of cameras mounted on the front of the test vehicle, that give an unobstructed view of what a racing driver actually sees and hears when operating a racing car at extremely high speeds. This photographic technique was used to great effect in the much more famous film GRAND PRIX, released five years later. This feature makes the film a must-see (if one can find it) for anyone interested in the sport of auto racing.