While reading a history of MV Agusta's racing motorcycles, I ran across a passage discussing 15-time world champion Giacomo Agostini at the height of his fame and popularity in the late 1960s, and the comment that he had even appeared in several films.

Well, I'd never heard of this before, and with visions of the two-wheeled Italian equivalent of an Elvis movie in my head, I dashed off to the IMDb to check it out. Sure enough, Agostini's listed as an actor in three films there, all dating from 1970: FORMULA 1 - NELL'INFERNO DEL GRAND PRIX, AMORE FORMULA DUE, and BOLIDI SULL'ASFALTO A TUTTA BIRRA (the latter with an incorrect poster image displayed, from a much later Hong Kong film with a similar title).

There's not much information on any of these aside from the titles and cast lists, but the titles would certainly lead one to believe that Ago is pretty much playing himself, i.e., "Handsome, Wealthy, World-Famous Racer", in all of them. Anyone seen these, or know of any other films he appeared in?

Dave

You guess right, basically. He plays a character more or less like himself (or his image), as tailored to whatever B-Movie cliches the particular plot picked from a bag of old standbys is following: a front-running rival on the track and in amour; a mechanic who can lead the pack and get the girl if he ever gets his break (hope he didn't tamper with the leader of the pack's vehicle!); the third tier driver in the team who will prevail, pull out ahead, and win the lady's love in the end. Given the cinema-ready excitement of the sport, I'm puzzled that racing movies are so consistently boring as a rule. Are there any good ones that reflect the sport as its really practised - ie, not DEATHRACE 2000- aside from HEART LIKE A WHEEL and TWO LANE BLACKTOP?

Mind you, I haven't actually seen any of these (though I have watched a bafflingly large number of Italian celebrity vehicles from the sixties into seventies, and know this stretch of track pretty well), but I have read the plots at cinematografo.it, a great resource, which does what imdb does, but with full summarie sand contemporary critiques whenever available ---all in Italian, alas, but I'll paraphrase the old AMORE FORMULA 2 review as a sample: Simple as drama, and very modest as a production, the film locks into three superficial elements of popular entertainment: sentimental intrigue, pop songs, and scenes of racing. (Segnalazioni Cinematografiche 70)

http://www.cinematografo.it/bdcm/bancadati...a=854&o=T&ty=AT

Not Agostini, maybe, but another 'racing' connected film with guest appearences - from Emerson Fittipaldi and Jackie Stewart - is Luciano Ercoli's crime thriller The Magnificent Daredevil. This has Giuliano Gemma as a hotshot racing driver who gets mixed up in a murder plot. Fittipaldi and Stewart appear in some grand prix footage (rather than actually acting). Not unlike The Devil With Seven Faces, which has George Hilton as a hotshot racing driver who gets mixed up in a murder plot. Or The Fuller Report, which has Ken Clark as a hotshot racing driver who gets mixed up in a murder plot. Or...

Matt B