Thanks for these, Doug. I researched this a while back and according to Motor Sport, Dec 1944, the filming was on the Frimley Green to Brookwood road. The cars were garaged at North Camp and allowed to run unsilenced and unlicensed from there on open roads to where filming took place. For those who don't wish to sit through the whole film, here's my synopsis:
It is of course a morality tale loosely based on the William Hogarth sequence of paintings of the same name, and opened in London's West End on December 6th 1945. After being sent down from Oxford and various failed ventures and adventures including a spell in prison for debt Harrison's character Vivian Kenway – the son of an MP – decides to join his old university friend Fogroy (played by Guy Middleton) as a racing driver for a British team called Astro, announcing to the husband of the woman he has recently had an affair with that he’s ‘just bought an old Grand Prix Delage – on credit’. To anyone with knowledge of motor racing this would seem to place Kenway very much in the same territory as Dick Seaman (with Fogroy as Whitney Straight), but rather than showing them in an heroic light it would perhaps have evoked memories of Peter Chamberlain’s controversial and scurrilous 1937 novel Sing Holiday! with its debauched characters. Some newsreel footage of the 1938 BRDC Road Race at Brooklands supposedly leads on to Le Mans, although when Kenway’s two-seater Bugatti leaves the pits it is transformed into an Auto Union Grand Prix car at Stavelot corner on the Spa-Francorchamps circuit! It is at this point that the sequences filmed in Surrey in 1944 appear, mostly as back projections, although Potter’s Bugatti crash was incorporated into the film and portrayed as a mishap to Fogroy. More newsreel – of the 1935 Spanish Grand Prix – follows, with Alfred Neubauer making a brief appearance as the winning car (actually a Mercedes Benz W25A driven by Caracciola) arrives at the finish line and pulls into the pits. The picture fades to show Kenway celebrating and a still zooms out to show a newspaper front page with the main headline ‘HITLER-MUSSOLINI PACT’.
Kenway and Fogroy then move on to Austria for a fictional Vienna Grand Prix at about the time of the Anschluß in March 1938. This race is of course cancelled, but Kenway – detained by the hotel management for failing to settle his bill – is bailed out by an attractive 21-year-old Jewish woman (Lilli Palmer) who pays it, asking in return that Kenway marries her in order that she can obtain a British passport and escape from the Reich. Marriages of convenience of this sort – swiftly followed by divorce – were not uncommon at this time, but the writers were again surely treading a fine line by naming the character Rikki, which for many viewers was once more probably too close for comfort to the name of Dick Seaman’s 18-year-old bride Erika. Kenway, as usual up to his neck in debt, agrees the deal, for which her father had offered to pay £1000, but inveigles another £2000 out of her – all £3000 of which Fogroy proceeds to lose on the stock market. Cutting a long story short, Kenway then takes Rikki to the family cottage in Cornwall, where he has an affair with his father’s secretary Jennifer (Margaret Johnston), who had been in love with him for years, causing Rikki to attempt suicide by drowning, although Kenway and his father rescue her. Driving back to London while drunk, Kenway crashes the car, killing his father and abandoning Rikki in hospital. Rikki divorces him and disappears – he becomes a car salesman, then sells cleaning materials door-to-door and finally ends up as a shilling-a-time dancing partner, depressed and drinking heavily. Jennifer finds him again and takes him under her wing and once he has recovered they are set to marry – Kenway sends her off to London to buy a wedding dress but when she returns he has disappeared, leaving a note which just says ‘Sorry darling – I can’t’. When war comes he joins the army and – unlike Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell – dies a hero’s death in combat although – a playboy to the last – his last words, reported by a corporal, were “something about it being a good year … I think he was referring to the champagne, sir, he had a bottle in his hand at the time.” Fogroy, serving in the same armoured car unit, remarks affectionately that Kenway “died as he lived, drinking champagne he never paid for.” The Daily Mail reviewer summed up Kenway as ‘a man of charm, intelligence, great physical courage, and no integrity of any kind.’
Motor Sport was presumably not impressed by this, since there is not a single mention of the completed film, even though their December 1944 report, which recounted the filming in Surrey, had expressed the sentiment that “it will be nice to see motor-racing in a film and it is all good publicity, unless the story spoils it.” So perhaps they felt – with more than a little justification – that their premonition that “we rather fear that, in the minds of film producers, the down-grade progress of a rake must inevitably include a spot of motor-racing, or shall we find that it helped towards his reform?” had been proved substantially correct. The motor racing scenes actually take up just two minutes of the 116-minute film.
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