pirelli's the tortoise and the hare film titles 1967

The Tortoise and the Hare Titles by Robert Brownjohn London 1967

Pirelli had presented films before, but never one like this. The earliest document ever filed in the archives of Cammell, Hudson and Brownjohn Associates was a two-page, dog-eared typescript marked ‘The Tortoise and the Hare: An Idea’…This was a film the associates had always wanted to make. Derek Forsyth who was Art Director for Pirelli at the time recounts: ‘We had a rough storyboard, a shooting script and we went off with Hugh and a small crew to shoot the film in Italy. The story was inspired by Aesop’s fable. Based on La Fontaine’s updated story. The fable is about two mismatched animals racing against each other. The tortoise is fed up with the boastful hare and challenges him to a race. Of course we all know that, through perseverance, the tortoise wins in the end.In the Pirelli film the tortoise is the truck driver and the hare is the E-type Jaguar driven by a girl (played by Liz Allsop – a famous model at the time in London). The girl is leaving the south of Italy to drive home in a white E-type Jaguar and there is a truck alongside her. And she makes stops to have lunch or look at the scenery while the truck carries on. There is a bit of innuendo, the driver stops by the side of the road to shave, she passes him and gives him a wave, and so on. At the end of the film she puts herself and her car on a train and as the train enters the tunnel, the truck passes her for the last time and the driver waves. We were cutting the film in the Cammell Hudson and Brownjohn studios on Chelsea’s Shawfield Street, and BJ was around so he was the obvious person to do the titles. He saw the film and he had the idea of putting the credits on moving trucks. It was such a clever and spontaneous idea. There wasn’t any kind of presentation, not storyboards or any of that crap, he just had the idea and found the money. Then we had to find a lot of trucks and rent an airfield. Bob Freeman (the Beatles photographer) was the cameraman and Hugh directed. It was the hardest thing because the titles kept falling off the trucks!’. The whole thing involved the complex choreography of various cars, lorries and industrial truck. BJ also designed the companion road map that went along with the Pirelli promotional film. The map displays the route taken in the movie and the front and back covers show stills from the titles. The film and titles won the First Prize at the Venice Film Festival, the British Industrial Award and was nominated for a 1966 British Film Academy Award.