Super Panavision, presented in Cinerama, sometimes created the awkward effect of width without height, but this suited John Frankenheimer's Olympiad of auto racing to a T. Frankenheimer was something of a Leni Riefenstahl of the mechanical world and Grand Prix, shot on location by an army of photographers during the 1965 season, captures vintage Lotuses, Jordan-BRMs, and Cooper-Maseratis from every angle and at speeds exceeding 100 m.p.h. in some of the most inventive cinematography of the decade. A romance which intrudes from time to time seems to function more mechanically than the race itself and finds its purest expression in the race, which is imbued with every emotion from sheer sexual energy to florid romanticism to high-speed horror. Montage effects engineered by Saul Bass rival the abstract or Underground films of the era in their expressionist use of multiple-screen imagery (we're talking 36 tiny pictures of the same gear shift!) and double and triple-dissolves. Of course the highlights of the film are the subjective shots that put you in the driver's seat, and thus Grand Prix is not for the weak of stomach.