Old Cars in the Movies
Prop Cars,
Comedy Trick Cars,
Gangster Cars

When you watch an old movie on TV are you sometimes distracted by an interesting old car until you lose track of the story? It happens to me all the time. Before TV and video tapes came into our lives few people ever watched really old movies (thirty, forty, and fifty years old). Now we can and we do. The old street scenes start our automotive nostalgia juices flowing.

The movie producers try to avoid anachronisms, but occasionally the eagle eyes of car fans will spot a 1940 car in a 1938 scene or a GMC pretending to be a German Army truck. I am hooked on old taxicabs, and when a movie star in an old picture gets into or out of a cab I look at the taxi, which may be an old Yellow of the 1920s, a Checker like the cabs used in Chicago for years, or an old New York DeSoto.

If we watch enough movies we will sooner or later see most makes of classic cars. A car of the correct type can add the right touch to a scene, and the wrong car can destroy the mood of the scene as suddenly as could the wrong costume on a star.
  

Comedies have used cars since the beginnings of movies, and during its long life the Model T Ford appeared in more movies than any other car. Practical and cheap, the Model T was also a natural comedian; its entrance into a scene automatically brought laughter just as the tumbling entrance of a circus clown brings automatic laughter.

A flock of Model T touring cars packed full of policemen chasing somebody was a common sight in comedies of the silent era, and running the scenes in fast motion made the cars seem to dart in front of trains, dodge trolley cars, and dance around like puppies chasing their tails.

Laurel and Hardy worked with old Fords well into the talking picture era, long after the Model T had become obsolete for ordinary transportation. One of their cars was squashed between two trolley cars until it was half-a-Ford long and a-Ford-and-a-half tall. A traffic officer ordered Laurel and Hardy to get the car off the tracks, so they drove it away. Another scene took place in a sawmill where a Model T was neatly sawed into two equal parts lengthwise. Each half moved off by itself, one driven by Laurel and one by Hardy. Some of the Fords were rigged to explode, collapse into piles of loose pieces of sheet metal, and get smashed by large and heavy vehicles. I have always admired the work of the good mechanics who fixed up those trick cars.
  

Cars that are chosen as props or co-stars in pictures have to look like the public’s idea of the right ones, which may or may not be historically accurate. Movies of the 1920-1933 Prohibition era usually show gangster cars and police cars, and the viewers expect to see long black touring cars bristling with guns. I can remember when the Chicago police used Lincoln and Cadillac touring cars, and for a short while they used Model A Fords and Nash cars. But a movie producer today would probably insist on a black Lincoln.

W.C. Fields sometimes used cars as props in his comedies, and Will Rogers frequently drove Fords. When I watched the excellent movie “The Sting” on TV for the third time I paid close attention to the cars. Chicago is my home town, and the cars in that movie seemed very well chosen; they even showed an ice truck passing by. The cars in the street scenes seemed to be the right mix for Chicago in the late 1930s. BUT there were no streetcars in the scenes, and the cars were all too clean and undented. Nobody noticed but me.

Movie studios used to keep a selection of cars for use in pictures as needed, but as time went by they sold their inventory and rented the cars. I have heard that now they depend somewhat on brokers, who know where all the old and rare cars are, and can get hold of something approximately accurate.

© 2001 Wilfred R. Franson