The Green Helmet

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a child, I read Jon Cleary's novel THE GREEN HELMET in 1955, and was glad to see it as a film in 1961. My sports car racing interest in its postwar golden age was strong, and this novel and film reflects that era well.

I have had many years of racing experience now, amateur and professional, to include employment with national championship teams and wins at the Daytona 24-Hour, Sebring, Road Atlanta, etc. The team/sponsor politics, dread and anticipation of crashes, test and practice sequences, are all good, for a movie.

THE GREEN HELMET will take you back to a day when driver's suits were cotton, roll bars were optional, and a guy with a garage special could win against the big factory teams.