Steve McQueen's 'Le Mans' movie

Steve McQueen intended to drive in the 1970 race (rumoured with Jackie Stewart) having come second at Sebring in a 908 with Peter Revson. Opinions differ as to how much McQueen actually drove there: Andretti (who won having swapped Ferraris after his broke) claimed Revson did >90% of the driving but he has no time for McQueen as a driver so would not like to be thought to have had a close finish with him.

Anyhow, Solar Productions insurers and investors banned McQueen from driving at Le Mans as he was their only asset (no other big name stars in the film). So his Sebring 908 was converted to carry cameras front and rear and entered in the race. Where it outperformed most of the field in the hands of Jonathan Williams.

After the race was over, Solar Productions took over the circuit, borrowed and bought representative cars (Jo Siffert made a fortune out of this) and played racing for months. So much so that the leaves started to turn brown and the story goes that the film crew had to paint them green to fix continuity. As is always the way when a film-maker gets carried away, the studio took the film away from him and it was finished by others. So some of it is perfect (they say McQueen personally supervised the placement of bugs on the windshields) and some of it is rushed (the last couple of laps).

The definitive study of the film is Michael Keyser and Jonathan Williams' wonderful book "A French Kiss With Death" (details on Keyser's "Autosportltd" website). There's a 30minute NTSC video that you can get from the States for about $15 with interviews with some of the survivors including McQueen's son's description of being taken by his father to the crash site where David Piper lost his leg.

It's one of my alltime favourite films, but it's probably not art or on Barry Norman's top 100 million films list.