Mille Miglia (1953)

The crowds are gathered in Brescia in their thousands as the legendary 1,000 mile race from their town continues down the coast of Italy via Ravenna and Pescara before it crosses the mountainous spine of country heading to Rome via L'Aquila then back up to Siena, Florence before Bologna and home. There's archive a-plenty as we visit the Maserati and Ferrari factories where the finishing touches are being put to their powerful engines - Enzo Ferrari is there to personally keep an eye on things. Alfa Romeo feature too with some secret testing to keep their new smaller, closed, car away from the prying eyes of their competitors. There are a few open cars too, with Reg Parnell trying out his new Aston Martin before the five hundred cars that have registered get ready for the off. What follows offers a remarkably comprehensive degree of coverage as the race whizzes around with different classes of cars competing on the same public roads and, as usual, Bill Mason's Shell Film Unit manages to capture some of the personalties. Stirling Moss, Tom Cole, the legendary Biondetti (the "Wolf of Tuscany"), Fangio, Kling, Villoresi and Bracco as well as some excellent archive footage of Jaguar, Lancia, Nash-Healey and Mercedes cars are filmed - perhaps by the 3-litre Ferrari driving Roberto Rossellini? (No, we don't see his new wife - Ingrid Bergman - calling an halt to his participation in Rome!) The music is annoying at times, but the audio is also good at providing a sense of the sheer power of the race as they race through the unforgiving terrain that mixes stretches of straight with mountain hair-pin bends. The first ten minutes of this is set up photography, and though informative isn't quite what you want to see - but once we get moving, we certainly get moving as they move off at one minute intervals and drive through daylight and darkness, using the odd in-car camera sequence to help give us a feel for the speed and peril of this treacherous course. It's a great opportunity to watch these stylish performance cars with brakes squealing careering around the countryside to enthusiastic receptions whenever they arrive, and the last ten minutes are quite exciting.