Expo 67 documentary plays out like a thriller
In an anniversary year that has seen numerous tributes to and retrospectives about Expo 67,
Expo 67: Mission Impossible stands among the very best.
It’s certainly the most entertaining of the bunch. And early on in the proceedings there’s a scene that really captures the magic of the project, as well as why the experience of this film is so riveting. Montreal was late to get the rights to host Expo 67, because the selection committee had originally chosen Moscow. By the time the U. S. S. R. backed out, it was already late in 1962, and by the time Montreal’s task force had decided upon a site and a general plan, it was already the summer of 1963 — less than four years before opening day. The commissioner general and his deputy were concerned about the formidable task that lay before them, so they hired a team to conduct a feasibility study. This team brought in an IBM computer to crunch the numbers and predict the very earliest date that the project could be completed. A brisk montage of vintage computers, adding machines, calculators, teletype machines, data cards, attentive technocrats, harried typists, and concerned data analysts accompanies the daunting list of everything that must be accomplished — seven million tonnes of earth excavated from the bed of the St. Lawrence, 847 buildings, 27 bridges and 82 kilometres of highways constructed, and the like.
The moment is tense, and the filmmakers draw out the sequence, heightening its suspense. Finally, the computer spits out its results. Date of completion: October 1969. Soon afterwards, the commissioner general and his deputy both quit, and the remainder of the film reveals
the lost, buried, and secret histories of the team of individuals who stepped up and banded together to take on the truly impossible task of seeing this Herculean project to completion and on time. Expo 67: Mission Impossible is a rare documentary in that it plays like a thriller. And it is an even rarer example of a successful thriller based on a true story, one whose outcome we’re all very much aware of.
In this sense, it shares a lot in common with James Marsh’s Man on Wire ( 2008), which dealt with Philippe Petit’s 1974 trapeze act between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, but was mostly about all the preparation, drama and intrigue that went into this feat, and which handled the material in such a way as to keep its audience glued to their seats.
Expo 67: Mission Impossible is primarily an archival project, and the team that made the film worked very closely with a team of researchers and archivists at Library and Archives Canada’s state- of- theart facility in Gatineau, Que., which houses a stupendous amount of film, audio recordings, photographs, printed materials and ephemera having to do with Expo 67.
Its concern for maps, blueprints, memos, and other documents, and the clever ways they’re presented to us, gives the film the look of a spy thriller. And because of the subject matter and the era in question, the film has an intoxicating pop esthetic to it, including the graphics, the architecture, the fashion, a quality that is further enhanced by the soundtrack, with its swinging sounds of the ’ 60s vibe — part Henry Mancini, part John Barry, part The Ventures.
But like Man on Wire, so much of what makes Expo 67: Mission Impossible irresistible has to do with its colourful interviews. It took a crack team of business types, public relations experts, advertising executives and engineers in order to realize such an undertaking, and you had to be a little crazy to even sign on in the first place. In fact, the film has the feel of Ocean’s Eleven ( 1960) at times — the directors in charge even referred to themselves by the name les durs (“the tough guys”) — the main differences being that this endeavour involved a team of thousands, that it created an epochal cultural event of international stature, and that there were only 10 individuals at the top.
Many of the interviews are absolutely priceless — full of insight, humour and warmth — and luckily for us, quite a number of the principals are still alive to tell their stories, because so many of them were so young at the time.
But in many ways, it is the flamboyant and charismatic Philippe de Gaspé Beaubien II, Expo’s director of operations, who steals the show. And fittingly it is Beaubien who gets the film’s final words, explaining the moral of the story: that something “sim-