Mr Darcy, look what’s under my bonnet . . .

7 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT SCREEN CAR CHASES

1 Critics say the popular new film Baby Driver has revived interest in the car chase. Until its release, it was widely believed that every variation on the theme of one car pursuing another had been exhausted.

Of the 32,837 car chases that took place on Tv and in the cinema in the period 2015-2016, over 60 per cent included scenes in which either the hero or villain could be seen stifling a yawn.

in last year’s blockbuster red Hot Crash speedway, Bruce Willis can be seen packing a cushion, a packet of trebor Mints, a Phil Collins CD, a cuddly toy and a thermos before he leaps into a getaway car. 2 Some 73 per cent of all car chases are filmed along the same stretch of road in Los Angeles, California.

stall-holder Jeff Klutz recently lodged a complaint with the city’s Board of Commerce, saying his fruit stall had been knocked over by a speeding car on average three times a week for the past 35 years. ‘it puts my customers off, knowing they’ll have to leap out the way every time they’re ordering a bag of peaches’, he argues. 3 Another LA street-trader, Vic ramone, says his glass-fitting business has run into similar problems. ‘seven times out of ten, when my men are carrying a large pane of glass across the street, a speeding car will smash into it. You know what? the insurance guys won’t even look at me.’ 4 At 1 Hour 25 Minutes, the longest car chase in cinematic history occurred in the low-budget nineties British cop film Put Your Foot On it.

‘We’d been planning on making it a simple car chase, five minutes max,’ explains director Geoff Dullard. ‘But we’d been reckoning without the M25 at rush hour.’

so when the villain played by ray Winstone, being chased by brave cop Gareth Hunt, turns left on to the M25 at Junction 28, he faces a tailback all the way to Junction 5, from sevenoaks. experts have calculated that the average speed of the final car chase was just under seven miles an hour.

‘Most of the film was taken up with Gareth Hunt switching channels on his car radio in search of traffic updates,’ says the producer. ‘sadly, it left no time for any shoot-outs or love interest. And it wasn’t helped by Gareth having to call the AA after half an hour, to help him change a burst tyre.’ 5 in An attempt to give his classic Death in Venice a more zippy ending, italian director Luchino Visconti filmed a ten-minute car chase.

sick to death of lolling about in his white suit on the Lido looking longingly at an attractive young man and generally feeling sorry for himself, Dirk Bogarde leaps into a Hillman Hunter with a fun-loving blonde and they chase a bank robber all the way around Venice.

‘We had so much fun shooting it,’ Bogarde recalls in his diaries. ‘But in the end Luchino decided to go for something more sombre, and the car chase was replaced with a slow walk along the beach.’

note for film buffs: the car-chase footage from Death in Venice later turned up in an episode of TV’s starsky & Hutch. if you look carefully, you can just see Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in starsky’s rear-view mirror as his car careers around the city. 6 The U.s. screen Actors Guild is calling for trained physiotherapists to be on hand following every car chase.

‘Constantly turning around in a vehicle to point your gun at the cars chasing you can lead to the most

frightful cricked neck,’ says top actor sylvester stallone. ‘i’ve tried Deep Heat, i’ve tried lavender oil, i’ve tried everything!’ ‘tell me about it, darling!’ says fellow movie hard-man russell Crowe. ‘And the blisters i’ve had from pressing on the accelerator pedal you simply wouldn’t believe! really, it’s a wonder i can walk at all!’

‘And firing a pistol at that angle plays absolute havoc with one’s nails,’ adds stallone, with a prolonged sigh. 7 The only car chase to have taken place in a Jane Austen adaptation came in Itv’s Pride And Prejudice (1971), starring Yootha Joyce as elizabeth Bennet and robert Hardy as Mr Darcy.

exiting discreetly from a grand ball, Lizzy pursues Mr Darcy in an off-white Ford Cortina, but he gives her the slip by taking an obscure B-road in his nippy Morris Marina. Luckily, both characters keep well within the speed limit, leading to the drama receiving the coveted responsible Motoring silver Award from the institute of road safety.

‘there were the inevitable complaints from so-called experts about historical inaccuracy,’ recalls director Brian Barnes. ‘But let’s face it, by the early 1800s there were already quite a few mid-priced family motors on the road.’