If you had to pick a scene from a movie that almost every piston-happy gearhead likes, but stipulated, for your own perverse motives, that the scene must not include a car, then I suspect that there would only be one scene that would actually qualify: the courtroom scenes from My Cousin Vinny. For a scene that has zero actual cars in it, there is some genuinely hardcore car-ificating happening here. There’s a lot of fairly technical and geeky automotive discussion going on, and while it’s surprisingly accurate for a mainstream, mass-market comedy movie, there have been some out there who have noted some oversights. I want to look at the most common of these complaints, and actually try and figure out how much that matters.
Who’s with me? Fantastic. First, in case you’re unaware of the movie, here’s a quick rundown: it was a 1992 comedy that had a surprisingly high-stakes plot for a comedy: two college kids from New York driving to Los Angeles end up accused of a crime that could end in their, holy crap, executions. They’re too broke for an actual lawyer, so one of them calls their cousin, who is a new, inexperienced lawyer, the titular (giggle) Vinny.
Part of the case crucially hinges on evidence involving some skidmarks and tire treads. Vinny’s (Joe Pesci) fiancée, Mona Lisa, played delightfully by Marisa Tomei, happens to be an expert on cars, having grown up in a family of mechanics. Vinny needs her as an expert witness, and she’s greeted with skepticism by the court, which is, of course, pretty well steeped in the old marinade of chauvinism and a disbelief that women know jack about cars. The opposing lawyer tests her, of course:
Lisa passes that test with the confident aplomb of an astronaut. Her automotive knowledge is established here, especially for mid-century American cars. Later, we get to the crux of why Vinny wanted her there in the first place, as she is able to effectively destroy the primary piece of evidence via her evaluation of the tire marks and her knowledge of cars of the era:
It’s also worth noting that the woman-who-knows-a-lot-about-cars trope has been used in movies plenty before and since then, but I think My Cousin Vinny handles it with a lot more grace and charm than the usual inane, ham-fisted way it’s handled, which is where they get a woman to look at a car and then recite a whole paragraph of specs while all the dudes around nod in disbelief.
The 2014 Need for Speed movie did this especially eye-rollingly, with the hilariously-named Imogen Poots:
Oy. Terrible.
Anyway, let’s get back to Vinny; to prove Vinny’s cousin’s innocence, he needed to show that the car that was allegedly spotted and left the tire marks was not the 1964 Buick Skylark that his cousin drove. Lisa’s assessment of the tire tracks notes three important points: the Skylark did not have a limited-slip differential (the tire/skid marks left were of equal length, suggesting that both wheels received equal traction); the Skylark has a solid rear axle, and the tire marks, one of which was on a curb and the other not, could only be made by a car with independent rear suspension, as both are full tire tracks and not showing a partial/sidewall mark that a non-independent axle would have made; and finally, that the Skylark is about the same dimensions as a Pontiac Tempest, which had independent rear suspension and a limited-slip diff.
Oh, and they both could be had in the same GM minty green color.
Here’s a transcript of the scene, if we need to refer to it:
Mona Lisa Vito
The car that made these two, equal-length tire marks had positraction. You can’t make those marks without positraction, which was not available on the ’64 Buick Skylark!
Vinny Gambini
And why not? What is positraction?
Mona Lisa Vito
It’s a limited slip differential which distributes power equally to both the right and left tires. The ’64 Skylark had a regular differential, which, anyone who’s been stuck in the mud in Alabama knows, you step on the gas, one tire spins, the other tire does nothing.
Vinny Gambini
Is that it?
Mona Lisa Vito
No, there’s more! You see? When the left tire mark goes up on the curb and the right tire mark stays flat and even? Well, the ’64 Skylark had a solid rear axle, so when the left tire would go up on the curb, the right tire would tilt out and ride along its edge. But that didn’t happen here. The tire mark stayed flat and even. This car had an independent rear suspension. Now, in the ’60’s, there were only two other cars made in America that had positraction, and independent rear suspension, and enough power to make these marks. One was the Corvette, which could never be confused with the Buick Skylark. The other had the same body length, height, width, weight, wheel base, and wheel track as the ’64 Skylark, and that was the 1963 Pontiac Tempest.
Vinny Gambini
And because both cars were made by GM, were both cars available in metallic mint green paint?
Mona Lisa Vito
They were!
Vinny Gambini
Thank you, Ms. Vito. No more questions. Thank you very, very much.
Now, one of the biggest criticisms of her testimony is that it wouldn’t just have been the Corvette and Pontiac Tempest that could have had independent rear suspension and a limited-slip differential. There’s another car that could have had these traits: the Chevrolet Corvair.
The screenwriter of the movie, Dale Launer, seems to have known this, but didn’t think it’d matter. He told the website The Wrap in an interview:
“I thought, ‘Well, no one’s really going to know that. I can think of one person I personally know who would know that. Oddly enough, I had not seen him since high school, and I saw him at the premiere. He said [laughs], ‘You know, there were actually three cars with independent rear suspension.’”
Yes, the Positraction limited-slip diff (that name was just used for Chevys; other GM brands called it Positive Traction) was available on the Corvair, but I’m not so sure the rear-engined Corvair’s presence would have changed Lisa’s point, really. Well, depending on what year Corvair, I suppose. That’s because even though Corvairs always had independent rear suspension, early Corvairs used a swing axle design, which would have changed the tire marks of the raised tire:
So, a ’65 and up Corvair with the Positraction diff could be a suspect, but likely not the early ones. Which brings us to the Tempest.
The Tempest, while not rear-engined, did have a rear transaxle, and was also a swing-axle design; it was independent rear suspension, sure, but it would have left the same type of tire marks as the early Corvair if one tire was higher or lower: that tire would have only left a partial mark, unlike what was shown.
Also, the Tempest did not have an option for a limited-slip differential! This article on Curbside Classic, also evaluating this very same scene, noted that back in 2023. All of this means that the Tempest really wasn’t a viable option to have left those tire marks after all.
The issues about the slightly different wheelbases and sizes of the Tempest vs. the Skylark I don’t think really matter; they’re within inches of one another, and are both fairly conventional-looking three-box sedans (or convertibles, in this case). Witnesses weren’t rushing over with tape measures or anything.
While these errors may sound devastating to Lisa’s testimony, I don’t actually think they were. Her fundamental assessment still stands and is still just as accurate as ever: the car that left those marks must have had an independent rear suspension and a limited-slip differential. Her evaluation of that was spot-on.
From there, all that really needs to happen is that the ’64 Skylark of the accused kids needs to be shown to not have those features. It definitely has a solid axle, so there goes the independent suspension part, and the Positive Traction differential was an option (and I don’t really think all that common, either), so as long as the court can be shown that the Skylark has neither of those things, they should be off the hook!
So, let’s recap here. While the main critiques of Mona Lisa Vito’s expert witness testimony are valid – the Pontiac Tempest was really not a viable suspect, while a later Corvair with the later double-jointed rear suspension and Positraction differential was – they really don’t change the most important point of the testimony, which is that the 1964 Skylark could not have left those tracks.
Even with these caveats, the scene remains one of the more technically accurate bits of automotive exposition in a movie, especially a non-car-focused movie. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s still a great scene.
I feel like the line about ‘enough power’ eliminates the corvair, since the quad carb models only had 140hp, and 180 in the turbo. And those were gross numbers.
Speaking of Miss Vito’s mechanical knowledge, I also enjoyed that scene where she talks about clocks.
I doth protest against the cutting of the scene !!!
It ends with “You’re a lovely /kiss/, lovely /kiss/ witness“
I’m just here to say three things:
1) This is one of my and my wife’s favorite movies, and one way instantly bonded over when we were dating. We are an internet success story, and she listed it as one of her favorite movies. That got me interested right away.
2) She got me in the habit of using “youts” to describe basically any silly or awkward young person – imagine a half-dozen 14-year-old boys hanging out together acting like a half-dozen 14-year-old boys. Those would be youts. I spell it “youts” and not “yutes” because I finally declared that it was an acronym for Young Oblivious Unemployed Teenager.
3) As a southerner, Fred Gwynne, rest in peace, wins my lifetime achievement award for Best Southern Accent By A Non-Southerner, Male. Although, I learned years later that although he was a native New yorker, he had cheated – as a boy, he apparently spent summers in South Carolina with family. (By the way, winner in the female category: South African Charlize Theron in “Devil’s Advocate,” playing opposite Keanu Reeves demonstrating THE VERY WORST EXCUSE FOR A SOUTHERN ACCENT EVER IN A MOVIE, EVER. I mean, EVER.)
WTF! You add a “(giggle)” after “titular” but not after “skidmarks”??? Tsk tsk tsk…
I can’t believe you would focus on this plot hole and gloss over that Joe Pesci had to win a case before he would marry Marisa Tomei, so she taught him trial law and won the case for him.
The honorable judge Herman Munster presiding.
He sits on the bench because his Achilles Tendon never healed.
Without trying to cause an uproar I prefer Cameron Diaz in Knight and Day where she says she can rebuild a transmission with a pair of pliers, something about a triple deuce carborator and get into Tom Cruises shorts without him noticing or something been awhile since I watched the flick.
To be fair, there is a lot of leeway as to the validity of what Cameron Diaz might say in the (very unlikely) off chance she’s trying to get into my pants.
I good question, then, is what two cars (of the Big 3) could be switched for the Skylark/Tempest which preserve the plot?
OR, what two cars could be used with different differences (Eldorado with FWD/other GM car with RWD) to get the kids off the path of death row in another movie, with Marisa Tomei?
Marisa Tomei. End of discussion.
That’s a very valid point. I’m sold.
Agreed, yes IMO.
Semi-related but not related: lawyer here, and My Cousin Vinny actually does a pretty great job of showing courtroom direct/cross examination techniques (and general criminal procedure). Of course there’s inaccuracies, by necesity. Any film that depicted actual criminal or civil procedure in-full would be dozens of hours long (and very boring); but again, MCV does a suprisingly accurate job at showing the profession.
Here’s a good youtube video of an actual lawyer reviewing the flick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1I7QBCHqng
I was just going to remark on that. And the Corvair angle actually fits here because the defense wouldn’t want to clutter up the case with hypotheticals.
As a car person, there is nothing as cringy as a scene that involves characters talking about cars. There is a scene somewhere that a woman talks about an engine in a Camaro and she says how it has an upgraded cam. In all fairness, it was Megan Fox, so I still watched.
There’s a movie I was recently introduced to called Tomboy that would absolutely make your head shrink into your body like a turtle, then. It’s called Tomboy. There’s all sorts of little things that’ll make you go “Oh god, really?” but the one that you can’t ignore is Tommy’s car for the finale. It’s a Corvair Monza GT, but they make it seem as though it’s front engined, and where the rear engine is there’s this giant cardboard inlet that feeds air to a fake rocket. And apparently the rocket is an “electronic turbo afterburner” that can be toggled on and off at will.
Marisa Tomei could tell me that vaccines are the root of all medical evils and I’d believe her.
Still one of my favorite movie scenes ever and cemented my love of Marisa Tomei.
From a distance it could be easy to confuse the cars as both had horizontal taillights, something the Corvair or Corvette did not have.
Just to nitpick the nitpicking… this 1964 Pontiac Tempest brochure indicates that a Safe-T-Track limited slip diff WAS available:
https://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/NA/Pontiac/1964%20Pontiac/1964%20Pontiac%20Tempest%20Deluxe%20Brochure/image18.html
Not to create nitpickception, but the Tempest under discussion is a ’63. 🙂
The Skylark is the ’64.
Yeah, ’64 was the first year the Tempest moved to a more traditional driveshaft and stick axle setup.
Yoots!
Dees two yoots
And the gut punch- (eye roll) Yootttthhhhssss!
I will accept no criticism of anything to do with Marissa Tomei, good day, sir!
I always thought it was pretty smart to have written that the offenders’ car would have an IRS since LSD swaps were common on the multitude of cars that were live axle and there were decades for that to have been done. Of course, the important part was proving that the kids’ car did not have an LSD while the offenders’ did, but I guess they wanted to have it be something more complicated.
I’ve heard more than one attorney say they love this movie. Apparently it’s also quite accurate from a legal standpoint.
[Disclaimer: I am not an attorney but write about a narrow range of legal topics.]
What I love about it is how it treated the idea of “assuming facts not in evidence”.
After the grit-maker scoffed and said “No self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits”, he followed up with “I take pride in my grits”. Without that second clarifying statement, observers would have been left to assume (?!?) that he was or was not a self-respecting Southerner (who by definition would have used only the long-cooking grits). The follow-up locks it down.
Then later, Sheriff Farley gets back on the stand and says “Acting on a hunch, I took it upon myself to [check for stolen cars]”. He is telling the truth, mostly, leaving it to interpretation that the hunch was his, when in fact it was not. And the way the actor delivered the line, I think his character was supposed to know exactly what he was doing by using that specific wording. Good stuff. 🙂
A lot of stuff in that movie was brilliantly nuanced. Very well written, directed, and acted.
Interesting take! We definitely discussed this one at length on an episode of Reels & Wheels, and my co-host, who happens to be a lawyer, really focused on the positive portrayal of the justice system here and how well the movie holds up as a way to work with a potentially hostile judge.
As for the tire track issue, some of my Corvair buddies will take issue with this take, but as someone who has owned and driven a 1965 Corvair, yes it does have independent suspension, but I don’t think it had enough beans to lay out a patch of rubber that long.
Could a Corvair be modified for that? Sure. One notorious mod was to flip the transmission over and mid-mount a V8 engine. You can’t do that in a convertible Corvair, so that means best case this was a turbo car, and it would have to be pretty heavily modified to leave that much rubber.
The Tempest, on the other hand, was available with a V8 and an inline 4. So, yeah maybe it didn’t have a limited slip diff, but it would be much more easy to squeeze that kind of power out of a Tempest.
I do think we’re pretty forgiving about the size difference between the Tempest and the Skylark – it was noticeably smaller, but maybe just noticeable to people like us.
The lesson here is that maybe the ’64 Skylark isn’t the best car for two Yoots in the first place? I’m partial to the 1970 Skylark myself.
I love this movie and was discussing it with my nephew just last night: neither of us can hear “Pontiac Tempest” or “metallic mint green paint” without going full-on MCV (or, as the Cool Yutes call it, 1105). However…
Ms. Vito’s statement was, as you quoted above, “The other had the same body length, height, width, weight, wheel base, and wheel track as the ’64 Skylark…” It sounds like the Tempest and the Skylark were not just similar or “about the same dimensions”; they were GM badge-engineered models. 🙂
Also she said “…there were only two other cars made in America that had positraction, and independent rear suspension, and enough power to make these marks…” (emphasis added) I believe that last clause knocks the Corvair out of consideration.
The Monza made 180 hp! That’s plenty!
But with the rear engine, wouldn’t the weight distribution mean it would just hook up and go instead of spinning the tires to make the skid marks?
I just don’t picture a stock Corvair being able to smoke both tires as extensively as we saw in the semi-aerial pic of the tire marks. They may have had the peak HP number but they did not have
maximum allowable torquageenough torque IIRC.The Corvair discussion omits the issue of track. I don’t have that figure at hand, but the ’64 Tempest is a 5-inch-wider car than the ’65 Corvair and I would expect the tracks to be different enough to matter.
Yep. As Ms. Vito described, the dimensions of the Skylark and the Tempest were I *CLAP* DENTICAL! *does weird jazz hands*
A strong piece of evidence that the defendants are guilty of this hy-EEN-ous crime.
Be careful when there are Corvair nerds around, Torch! “Monza” and “Monza Spyder” are not the same thing. On a 1962-64 car, it had to say Spyder on the badge to get a turbo, but there were 1960-64 non-turbo, non-Spyder Monza coupes, convertibles, sedans, and even ’62 wagons. That early turbo motor made 150 HP. The 180 HP turbo you refer to was available in 1965-66, and the model it was available in was not a Monza anything, it was a Corsa. The Corsa was also available with a naturally-aspirated, four-carb, 140 HP engine. Regular, non-turbo Monza coupes, sedans, and convertibles were still offered through 1969, with the four-carb engine available as an option in any second-gen Corvair, although it was briefly discontinued in 1967 before returning to production.
But, yeah, others’ points about both relative lack of power and rear weight bias are good ones—I don’t think any Corvair in relatively stock form is laying down too many patches. I think the screenwriter covered their butt pretty effectively with that line.
I remember seeing this movie in the theater and being conflicted – on one hand, it was the only movie ever that directly references my chosen profession(I’m a differential rebuilder/fabricator), but I was pretty sure there was never an LSD available in that Pontiac “rope drive” transaxle. Hell, an LSD was an extremely rare option in a ’64 Skylark.
But I thought the movie was so good that I just didn’t care.
Yeah, the most important part of her testimony is simply that the Skylark could not have been the getaway car, making the FBI’s tire analysis irrelevant and further invalidating the eyewitnesses that were already shown to have credibility problems. That the Skylark couldn’t make those marks is a fact, everything else she says, including that an eyewitness (especially one of those witnesses) couldn’t mistake a Corvette for a Skylark, is speculation
Mistaking the Corvette for a Skylark….. I would love to work through that..
Is she speculating there, with room for objection? Who can speak for EVERYONE else in the world?
BUT, is she stating it as a fact as an ‘automotive expert’, which was established and agreed to by prosecution?
I am not sure if I wouldn’t have objected if I were prosecuting.
One witness has extremely poor eyesight with a badly outdated eyeglass prescription and saw the two cars from her porch across the street. One witness was watching TV in his living room next door and briefly glimpsed the two cars through a very dirty window fitted with a corroded and debris covered screen, with a line of dense vegetation between his house and the store. We also don’t know how knowledgeable or interested in cars any of them are, but most of the general population is not. Under those circumstances, a green Stingray roadster vs a green Skylark convertible? Yeah, a witness could mix them up.
Assuming they even saw a green 1960s American convertible. The eyewitnesses in the DC sniper case described a white van, when they were actually driving a blue Caprice
I differ back in the 3 channel tv aerial antenna days going down to the car dealership and seeing the new models was a pretty big event right up there with the county fair
I don’t believe that was ever the bulk of the population, more people cared in the ’50s and ’60s than they do today, but more doesn’t mean most.
My Mississippi-born and raised late paternal grandfather told me once about the colored folk who went to the post office in their new Cadillacs, to pick up their welfare check, and I wondered then and since, if he honestly knew what the new Cadillacs looked like every year they were made. Maybe the Cadillacs were a couple of years old when he saw them…who knows.
To a lot of people, a green convertible is just a “green convertible”, or even just “an old green car”, you can’t always expect any more than that
Reagan loved to tell the story of Linda Taylor on the campaign trail. She was a con artist who did own 3 new Cadillacs at one point. She also posed as a nurse to kidnap infants from hospitals to sell and probably murdered a few people for insurance money.
Yeah, I think the correct takeaway, as written on the DA’s face at the end of her testimony, is more like, “Uh oh. The state’s case just died.”