I was rewatching Fargo recently (as in the 1996 Cohen Brothers film, as opposed to the also-very-good TV series), and I couldn’t help thinking about how terrific a car movie it is.
It’s certainly not a cool-car movie if you’re looking for cool in the Cannonball Run mode with a plethora of commonly-accepted-to-be-cool cars, but as a movie with a bounty of perfectly-cast cars, each an interesting choice for the character behind the wheel, its role in the film, and the North Dakota setting? Fargo is pretty much a masterpiece.
The bulletproof and stalwart Panther Ford cop car is an ideal choice for equally unflappable Police Chief Marge Gunderson, while the hapless victims of the hitman’s first bullets in the movie just had to be driving a gutless Ford Tempo.
Desperation and desolation are the themes for much of the movie in depressing wintertime Minnesota, and the rather pathetic cars reflect it. Partial payment for a mock kidnapping comes in the form of one of the blandest cars of all time: a brand-new beige Cutlass Ciera.
Even the setting of a dealership full of 1987 Oldsmobiles was perfect; personality-free General Motors cars that create the fabric of a boring living hell for the protagonists.
The scene portraying the closing of a car purchase doesn’t just illustrate what the main character’s pitiful daily life is like. This might be one of the finest car-related scenes ever to appear in a film, and by far the best illustration of a car purchase. It’s spot-on and reinforces why, unlike many Autopians, I’d be happy if I never had to buy or trade another car for the rest of my life and try to do so only once a decade at most:
I was still thinking about Fargo when I caught White Noise while flipping channels a few days later, and once again I found myself musing about the well-cast cars and how they help shape the comedy-drama and its 1985 setting.
If your family didn’t have a Caprice Classic wagon like the primary characters in the film, you almost certainly had friends who did. Supposedly procuring malaise-era cars for movies today is a tough task since absolutely nobody preserved these things.
Truth be told, the eccentric family of Adam Driver’s professor character should have been cast with a beat-up orange Volvo 245DL wagon or rusting white 1977 Peugeot 504 three-row wagon. Still, the big GM wagon is perfect.
So what are your favorite “car movies” that are not-about-cars movies? Let’s talk about it!
Tremors. Ever vehicle was cast perfectly.
Twilight
I will go with your judgment. I have made it my mission in life never to see this series just for the shock on people’s faces when I tell them I’ve never seen it.
Stephanie Meyer is a car enthusiast!
My spouse repeatedly bludgeons me with the line “I don’t speak Car and Driver”
Does she speak Road and Track?
I have done the same with Titanic, which both my girlfriend and my late mom refer to as “that damn boat picture”.
Good choice.
Close! “The Host” is a far better book and the movie rocks because Sioroise Ronan. Plus, Diane Kruger drives a chrome Lambo.
Back to the Future (BTTF1, and 2. [3 was more horse than HP]) Watch the Town Square scenes and compare the cars in 1985, 1955, and 2015.
https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Motor_vehicles_in_Back_to_the_Future
The “Welcome Back, Norman” short, made famous by RiffTrax, has a great collection of late 1970s Malaise Era cars on display in the parking lot of Detroit Metro Airport.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnTS6cIv8i8
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Not the fake Ferrari California, bit all the other cars. Jeannie’s Fiero. Cameron’s “shitty” Alfa sedan. Dad’s Audi. Mom’s Chrysler wagon. Perfect.
+1 came here for this
Absolutely. I still laugh thinking about Rooney’s K-car getting towed at the end (spoiler alert). Pretty sure that was yet another reason I didn’t care for the one my family owned.
Jurassic Park! Those Exploders and Jeeps are ICONIC. Fun Facts- In the book, the Explorers were Land Cruisers. During pre-production, the team mocked up a convertible Suzuki Sidekick rather than the Explorers. I think some of the scenes in that movie would have been quite different if they had followed through with that decision…
The red wheels on the jeeps were a last minute addition- there are pre-production pictures on site in Hawaii with the standard gold steel Sahara wheels. And they were set to use, since they were shod in BFG radial all terrains, not the standard jeep tires.
Supposedly, Kate Capshaw had recently bought an Explorer and really liked it, and Steven Spielberg preferred to go with something American in the movie, also Ford had a bunch of flood damaged examples to give them that nobody minded destroying
The novel used Land Cruisers, custom built by Toyota, which tied in with Ingen being funded entirely by Japanese venture capital
I was gonna say Blues Brothers, but Beto O’Kitty beat me to it.
However, American Graffiti is also a choice car viewing film. And since it’s a film in which nothing really happens, you’re free to just ogle the cars and not pay too much attention to anything else.
American Graffiti is basically a French new wave film with less smoking.
The scene in the junkyard is pretty great.
License to Drive is another car-adjacent movie that still had brilliant casting of vehicles. From the Chevette(?) with Uncle Phil at the DMV driver’s test, to the Rabbit Cabrio driven by Heather Graham, to grandpa’s vintage 70s Cadillac, it all worked perfectly.
I’m always surprised how many people I meet who have never heard of it, this was one of the seminal Corey/Corey movies of the late 80s.
I nominate the Bourne series, especially Identity with the Mini, had some good car action.
Bending the rules a bit, but whoever did the car casting for the Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul universe (which includes the movie “El Camino,” so it counts) absolutely deserves a raise because they nailed it.
In one episode of BCS, they showed a Ford Taurus station wagon and referred to it as a Mercury Sable. I thought this was typical Hollywood error where they found a car that was close enough, but no, the characters’ misidenfication of a Mercury Sable as a Ford Taurus was actually a plot point in the episode! I was blown away.
https://breakingbad.fandom.com/wiki/1988_Mercury_Sable
Another great series car casting was Mindhunter.https://www.imcdb.org/i001295045.jpg
I never got into that show but a friend of mine who is also a mega car nerd couldn’t stop raving about the car content.
I had trouble finding any flaws. Whoever it was doing the casting, they were GOOD.
For both the people and the cars. The endless parade of rental malaise they pick up at the airport, including the random cars in every parking lot – pretty sure I spied my dad’s 1977 Thunderbird in there somewhere. And that brief montage shot of the big red LTD on the side of the road up on its bumper jack was not only a great visual, but also hit me in the 70s-kid feels.
As for the actors: somewhere in the middle of the series, I remarked to my wife that if, God forbid, you should ever need the feds’ help with anything, there’s nobody you’d want on the case more than Special Agent Bill Tench – forthright, committed to justice under the law, not here for your bullshit, could probably mop the floor with you if he had to, under a proper fed brush cut. A G-man’s G-man.
Speaking of cars: his standard issue unmarked Plymouth Satellite fedmobile. I remember those being the lousy cars detectives drove on cop shows as a kid. It had been so long since I’d seen one by the time his appeared onscreen, I surprised myself by how damn handsome a car I thought it was.
My only real complaint? The suits and ties aren’t authentically ugly enough, and the haircuts aren’t authentically stupid-looking enough. Not a hair helmet in sight. Otherwise, the show is a time machine.
Fast and Furiouses 5-9.
Those movies are about Family.
Back to the Future — yes, the key hero of the movie was a DeLorean, but they almost downplayed it.
Then you had Marty’s Toyota pickup that he wanted so badly, plus countless 50s cars in the original, all the dystopian stuff in part 2. Tangentially you also had cars dragging Marty all over town on his skateboard, the Libyans in their Microbus, and probably some more I’m forgetting.
Even the setting of a dealership full of 1987 Oldsmobiles was perfect; personality-free General Motors cars that create the fabric of a boring living hell for the protagonists.
I can see a couple of red ones in there, which makes it more interesting than any GM dealership now…
I think it’s a few years newer but I like the Cutlass Ciera wagon nearest the camera, silver or not.
Robocop,TheTerminator,and T2.
How about the retro-futuristic world of EV conversions that is Gattica.
Anything directed by Andrew Niccol has cool cars in it. See also Anon and In Time.
Anon’s Olds Toronado is my favorite. Though it meets such a terrible, movie-specific end.
Only Lovers left Alive just for the scenes of the leads cruising around the decaying remains of Detroit at night in a Jaguar XJ-S.
“Alright, alright, alright!”
Dazed and Confused.
Absolutely, the cars were just as important to the cast as the characters were.
Pretty sure this is a car movie, so I don’t think it counts. Great cars, though.
I would say the definition of a “Car Movie” is where the cars are named, explained, and at the center of the plot. IMO, D&C (I’ve seen it over 100 times) is one where cars only play a supporting role, most of them just extras in the scene.
IIRC, there’s only one specific discussion about cars in the whole movie (the whole Melba Toast speech on mods and tires).
Yes, I’m a nerd, but hopefully for the right stuff 🙂
The Right Stuff wasn’t a car movie, dummy.
I’m with Ash78 on this one. It’s a high school movie set in the 70’s when cars were a big influence on the American high school culture. Kinda like how phones/social media are a huge influence on high schoolers today.
It’s a movie about my uncle’s teen years in south Alabama. Seriously, I could have been an extra as one of the cool kids’ little brother or nephew. The cul-de-sac I lived on in the late 70s often looked like the parking lot at the party at the Moon Tower on a Friday night. So yeah, it’s full of hot cars.
I went to high school in suburban northern NJ in the early ’80s and it looked a lot like Dazed and Confused. The ’70s hung on at least until I graduated in ’84, despite the 20 mile distance to New York City.
How about animated TV shows?
Archer is/was fantastic with “cars in the background”.
YES
Bob’s Burgers does a surprisingly good job too.
The level of detail they put into Bob’s Volare wagon, including the interior, was very impressive.
The Venture Brothers. Brock Samson has a ’69 Charger named Adriene; Henchman #24 has a Nissan Stanza (later christened the MonarchMobile), Orpheus has a Type 1 VW, and Dr. Venture buys a C3 Corvette, among others.
Same with King of the Hill
Words can’t describe my joy that the makers of that show deliberately sought a way to make a “Smokey And The Bandit” tribute show of sorts, much less to write the actual Burt Reynolds into an episode before that. See also: profile pic.
And Archer in a dinner jacket behind the wheel of a Ferrari 308, as the shot pulls back to show that it’s on a rollback tow truck, made me laugh harder and longer than it should.
Smokey and the Bandit. No movie has ever made me want a Pontiac Trans Am more than that.
I’m pretty sure most of us would consider that a car movie.
Seconded. Total car movie. It even has a big reveal of the car.
True Romance. Loved the porsche flat nose. Bonus points for the eldorado
I didn’t see the White Noise movie, but in the book, Gladney was a Hitler Studies professor that he leaned into very hard, so methinks a Mercedes Wagon would be fitting.
Technically, yes but there’s no way he could afford even a four year old one at the date this movie was supposed to take place (imports started in 1980, with John Lennon owning the first one).
Yeah, if you adjust the list prices for inflation, the Benz wagons were basically a $100K proposition throughout the ’80s—almost on par with where the AMG versions are now, but with none of the performance since the wagons were diesel-only in the US until 1988.
I’ll go out on a limb here with this one. “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar.” The 1967 Cadillac DeVille convertible is a key plot point and their primary form of transportation. The incompetent sheriff drives a Dodge Diplomat, very fitting. Plus some fun background cars, an Acura Integra, an air-cooled Porsche, some old American pickups. Maybe not a full blown “car movie” but cars definitely play a big role.
Plus, where else are you gonna see Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and Joe Leguizamo in full drag driving a big yellow Cadillac? A memorable line, “internal combustion…the ultimate accessory.” I hadn’t heard of the movie till last year and now it’s one of my favorites.
Just rewatched it this past week after seeing John Leguizamo on his CNN food show.
I had forgotten how the entire town turned out to support the drag queens!
To stick with the Cohen brothers theme – The Big Lebowski is also very well-cast when it comes to cars.
“Do you see what happens, Larry?!”
Many years ago I went to a Lebowski Fest in L.A. and my favorite costume I saw there was a small blonde woman dressed as a Stranger in the Alps.
That’s like going to a Die Hard convention dressed as Mr. Falcon!
I really hope someone has done that.
Is that like wearing a pair of bib overalls and carrying a cantaloupe?
So that you are a Mellon Farmer?
A film school favorite. Often a bunch of mellon farmers would show up.
None better than Ronin.
I think dozens of us would consider Ronin a car movie.
I just don’t want to ever have to waste 2 more hours of my life watching that movie ever again.
Blues Brothers
Beat me to it