The Green Helmet

Reasonably entertaining British film.

Follows the ups and downs of a fading champion race car driver and his antagonistic relationship with his younger brother who wants to take over the wheel.

Includes some solid racing footage from Sebring, Goodwood and various European tracks. Sid James portrayal of an Australian is a bit shaky (count the number of times he says "sport" .. it seems to be in every second sentence).

Special guest appearance by real life Australian world champ Jack Brabham adds a touch of nostalgic interest.

Not exceptional but enjoyable enough.

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.

I don't think the other reviewers do justice to this movie. The racing scenes are excellent, plenty good enough to give you a feel for how terrifying it is to drive at high speed. It's second only to 1966's "Grand Prix" which had the luxury of color, a bigger budget and newer technology.

Plot-wise, you can only do so much with a racing story. No one avoids the cliches. This plot is at least as good as "Grand Prix". The real attraction here is the cast and the cars.

Bill Travers is excellent as the older racing driver, Syd James is always top-notch, and Ed Begley for once is not over the top in his acting. The supporting cast is all fine and believable. We even get a cameo of Jack Brabham, real life three time formula one champion.

All the cars shown are fun to see nowadays. There are lots of Triumph Heralds, which were even sold in the USA in the 60's, a Triumph 2 or 3, what look like Jaguar D-types, and many more I don't recognize.

The climactic race at the Mille Miglia has a lot of hair-raising scenes of racing on regular roads through towns and along cliffs. I looked on Wikipedia and the race was discontinued in 1957 after one too many fatal crashes, so the movie does not exaggerate the danger.

Well worth a watch.

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.

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.