Word: bedford
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Coat hangs on a double frame-up. A dumb penguin of a waiter (Roddy Mc-Dowall), who wants to cloak the cipher of his existence with something or other, answers an advertisement for an astra khan coat. The man selling the coat is a criminal dandy (Brian Bedford) of homosexual bent who tyrannizes over his two colleagues, a bizarre, dress-alike brother and sister known as The Heavenly Twins. Diabolic purists who love crime for crime's sake, the three want a fall guy to take the rap on a diamond heist. When the circumstantial evidence is finally planted...
Regrettably, Director Frankenheimer occasionally feels obliged to stop racing and start plotting. He has four heroes (James Garner, Yves Montand, Brian Bedford, Antonio Sabato), all cast as racing drivers. The story purports to describe what they do when they are not driving-and the girls they do it with. The girls (Eva Marie Saint, Francoise Hardy, Jessica Walter) are pretty, but somehow they don't seem all that exciting in a film that focuses so satisfactorily on a different sort of exquisitely classy chassis...
...bungles the job miserably and wallows for 2 1/2 of its 3 hours in its own plot complications. Arthur spends too much time on his dreary characters, barely managing to solve their problems and tie-up the loose ends for the finish. He introduces an English driver (Brian Bedford) who competes neurotically to break the track record of his dead brother, a one-time world champion. But Arthur soon forgets about his elaborately stated plot premise and does nothing with the character. An American (James Garner), supposedly the lead character, has such little function he hardly appears in the second...
...Frequently, Frankenheimer fails to establish the location of his characters, or which Grand Prix we happen to be watching. The characters never talk about racing realistically, or speak about it on a technical plane. To them, Arthur and Frankenheimer would have us believe, racing only inspires soul-searching metaphor; Bedford says, "with a car, you can take the body off, find out what's wrong, and fix it. Too bad people are never like that." Perhaps most exasperating though is the scene where Garner is forced to watch 16 mm footage of his mistakes in the last race. Frankenheimer effortlessly...
...DAVID CHEN Bedford, Mass...