Lights! Camera! Action!:
Out on the track!
Cinema and television are certainly not immune to the lure of Monza. In 1950, the track was turned into a set, with Amedeo Nazzari together with the driver of the moment, Juan Manuel Fangio. Nazzari raced in fiction, for the film Last Meeting, a popular production by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, scripted by the writer Alberto Moravia, among others. Fangio himself raced for real, with the Alfa 159 making its debut at the Italian Grand Prix that year. Proudly emblazoned on his overalls were the “Alfa Romeo” and “Pirelli” logos. In 1951 the house organ Fatti e Notizie wrote about “Actors and Drivers” and even then, the Argentine champion may have sensed that he would become the most filmed driver in history. Fifteen years and five Formula 1 World Championships after Last Meeting, Juan Manuel Fangio appears aboard a red spider back on the Parabolica banking at Monza, in front of the camera. Then he stops, takes off his gloves, and looks at the audience: “I used to race with the Pirelli Stelvio, but this Cinturato is extraordinario!”
He was the star in a Carosello television commercial produced by Gamma Film and in a photographic reportage by Ugo Mulas. From cinema to television, and then back to cinema: A biopic, Fangio: A Life at 300 An Hour, came out in 1981. The director was Hugh Hudson, who just a few years earlier, in 1966, had directed The Tortoise and the Hare, a road movie for Pirelli that advertised the Cinturato tyre that Fangio had called “extraordinario”. And in 1981, another film directed by Hudson went on to win four Oscars: Chariots of Fire, with an unforgettable soundtrack by Vangelis.
Cinema and television are certainly not immune to the lure of Monza. In 1950, the track was turned into a set, with Amedeo Nazzari together with the driver of the moment, Juan Manuel Fangio. Nazzari raced in fiction, for the film Last Meeting, a popular production by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, scripted by the writer Alberto Moravia, among others. Fangio himself raced for real, with the Alfa 159 making its debut at the Italian Grand Prix that year. Proudly emblazoned on his overalls were the “Alfa Romeo” and “Pirelli” logos. In 1951 the house organ Fatti e Notizie wrote about “Actors and Drivers” and even then, the Argentine champion may have sensed that he would become the most filmed driver in history. Fifteen years and five Formula 1 World Championships after Last Meeting, Juan Manuel Fangio appears aboard a red spider back on the Parabolica banking at Monza, in front of the camera. Then he stops, takes off his gloves, and looks at the audience: “I used to race with the Pirelli Stelvio, but this Cinturato is extraordinario!”
He was the star in a Carosello television commercial produced by Gamma Film and in a photographic reportage by Ugo Mulas. From cinema to television, and then back to cinema: A biopic, Fangio: A Life at 300 An Hour, came out in 1981. The director was Hugh Hudson, who just a few years earlier, in 1966, had directed The Tortoise and the Hare, a road movie for Pirelli that advertised the Cinturato tyre that Fangio had called “extraordinario”. And in 1981, another film directed by Hudson went on to win four Oscars: Chariots of Fire, with an unforgettable soundtrack by Vangelis.
