Film Review: "State of Siege" --- Past Becomes Prelude

It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...  

Soon enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat.  It belongs to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay.  The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here.  Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.

In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals.  Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...

Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage.  Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions.  Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...

Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...

Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer.  By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy.  By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.  

In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore.  This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time.  The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...

The students at a local university are not in denial, however.  They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay.  In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...

Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views.  At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...

He seems aware of what's going on below the surface.  By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples.  In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses.  The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.

In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him.  It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness.  In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months.  Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.

Photo Credits:  All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).

Book Review: Sports Cars by Charlotte & Peter Fiell--- What Collector Tastes Say About Society

If you like old cars and you're looking for a distraction from the relentlessly bleak news about the world around us, you could do far worse than spending a weekend sinking into Sports Cars, by Charlotte & Peter Fiell, published in 2023 by Taschen.  The ample color photography is all as well-composed as the cover shot of the '56 Ferrari 290 MM, and there are monochrome photos of the races where many of these cars originally competed.  The book is divided into eras: 1910-1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s-90s, and the 2000s. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on "ultimate collector cars", and this occasionally leads to featuring a car that attracts huge auction bids today, rather than one that was more innovative technically, or more successful in racing. But because there's all that photography to go with the stories, this aspect of the book will only strike you if you're a fan of a particular car.  Like the Maserati 300S which is not featured, but more successful in racing than big brother 450S, which is.  Or like Italy's pioneering Lancia, which is not featured at all...

We understand that the 50-car, 511-page format imposes limits, but think that some redundancy could be reduced. Keep the classic Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, but drop the roadster, likewise choosing the race-winning Shelby AC Cobra 289 over the 427.  There could be some culling of racing red Ferraris, too.  Then maybe the authors would have room for the Lancia D-24, above, which beat Ferrari in the '53 Carrera Panamericana, the '54 Mille Miglia and the '54 Targa Florio.  The section on 70s cars is kind of thin, as it features only one car actually introduced in '67, so it would benefit from inclusion of Lancia's Stratos HF, which won the World Rally Championship in '74, '75 and '76.  If that's not a 70s landmark, nothing is.  Maybe for a future revised edition...

The text helpfully lists the engine size, configuration and power, transmission type, top speed and number produced for each car, and tells the creation story of each. Engineers and body designers get plenty of credit along with race drivers; even the poster artists get mentioned.  You might be surprised to discover that the 1912 Stutz Bearcat featured a 3-speed transaxle nearly 4 decades before Lancia introduced the first modern production car with front engine and rear transaxle.  You won't be surprised that Maserati gets 3 cars included, but not the offshoot OSCA made by the Maserati brothers, as the OSCA is better-known by racers than trend-conscious collectors...

Other etceterini like the 60s Fiat Abarth below didn't make the grade, perhaps because they are typically small and auction for 6 figures instead of 7 or 8.  Perhaps for similar reasons, pioneering beauties like the Lotus Eleven and Type 14 Elite don't appear.  Again, a suggestion for a future book...

The chapter on 1960s cars makes it clear the authors feel this was a golden age; they include 17 cars.  Six of these are mid-engined, showing the effect of the revolution presaged by the Porsche 550 Spyder in the 50s chapter, realized by Cooper's GP Championships in '59 & '60, and reflected in production cars like the Lamborghini Miura S below.

The section on the 1970s-90s surprises by including only one car from each decade.  The '71 Lamborghini Miura SVJ is really a modified version of the P400 Miura which first appeared in 1967.  Representing the 70s instead, you might've expected to see Lambo's LP400 Countach, also bodied by Bertone, as Marcello Gandini's wild wedge occupied so many posters on teenagers' walls and influenced other cars of that decade.  Gandini's earlier design for the Miura is more graceful and fluid, though, and the first of 4 SVJs attracted a huge auction bid because it was built for the Shah of Iran (the money factor). The money factor began to dominate as we moved into the 1990s, just as it became clear that the distribution of wealth in society had shifted upward to the peak of the socioeconomic pyramid...

The authors selected the McLaren F1 to represent the 90s (no complaints there on technical or esthetic terms). The original price range of the F1 was $800,000 to $1 million, making it stunningly expensive as well as stunning.  The 3-passenger, center-steered, mid-engined road rocket signaled the beginning of the transition from supercars to hypercars, cars that were purchased because of their high prices, rather than despite them.  The authors note that the Sultan of Brunei bought 3 of the 6 special LM models; one wonders if he will drive all of them.  F1s have since brought auction prices of up to $20 million; one guesses owning half of the special LMs produced will have some effect on an LM's eventual auction price.  By the 2000s it was apparent that these types of cars had entered the category of vacant Manhattan penthouses owned by oligarchs in distant dictatorships; they are places to park money rather than driving or racing machines.  By the 2000s hypercars proliferated along with the lopsided distribution of wealth; the authors feature 8 cars in that chapter, many of them with contrived, gimmick-ridden forms designed to capture attention in an attention economy, including Ferrari's La Ferrari. Something has gone off track when the builders need to tell you twice that their product is a Ferrari. Superlatives and hyperbole begin to run a bit rampant in this chapter, and a visit by the Adjective and Adverb Police might have been helpful.  Perhaps a future revised edition will note that the 90s also produced the Lotus Elise, a compact, lightweight, reasonably-priced sports car that was fun to drive.  Its chassis design was shared by the later Tesla roadster.  But that is a story for another chapter...

Footnote: 

For more info (along with photos) on the cars we'd have added (without being invited) to the Fiell's awfully good-looking book, you might want to have a look at the following posts from our archives:  Lancia Stratos;  "Lost Cause Lancias: New Stratos and Old Hyena", posted Feb. 15, 2018.  OSCA: "The Etceterini Files Part 30: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous: OSCA" posted April 20, 2016.  The Lancia D24 is described in photos and text in "1st Impressions of the Monterey Historics: Whatever Lola Wants..." posted August 28, 2018,  

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author, except for the 3rd from the top (Lancia Stratos), which is from Wikimedia; the shot of the book's cover features Tim Scott's photo of the Ferrari 290MM for RM Sotheby's.

Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater

Walking north along Boulder's 14th Street from the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, it's hard to miss the Boulder Theater, a surviving landmark from the depths of the Great Depression, and one of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in Colorado...

When Kansas City architect Robert Boller of Boller Brothers (founded by older brother Carl) was selected to turn the 1906 Curran Opera House into a palace for showing motion pictures, his design went beyond mere renovation to replace the old Curran with a new structure, auditorium and facade to reflect contemporary design themes.  During the Curran's nearly 3 decades of service, it had also hosted orchestral concerts and also some silent films, which presaged the flexibility it would need to survive later in the century.

Architectural historians think that Boller's design for the Boulder Theater building owes a bit to the Boulder County Courthouse, completed in 1933 to the design of local architect Glen H. Huntington.  It's right across 14th Street, and when you walk around to look at the courthouse facade facing Pearl Street, below, you see what those historians mean. The theater facade echoes the stepped, symmetrical facade of the courthouse, with its highest parapet over the central entry.  The courthouse is faced in sandstone from a dismantled railroad building, an early example of recycling building materials. Boller's theater facade contrasts with the restraint of the WPA Moderne courthouse, though, with exuberant Art Deco patterns of brightly colored terra cotta surrounded by stucco. That facade, protected by a legal easement sponsored by Historic Boulder, was restored with the help of a grant from the National Trust for Historic Places, and completion was celebrated on November 5 of this year.

The theater was one of the first in the country, and likely the first in Colorado, to feature a sound system with woofers and tweeters. In 1935, the year it was under construction, MGM's Shearer Horn amplifiers were released, a 2-way system with woofers for lower frequencies and tweeters for higher ones. There were also special precautions against fire.  Unlike many theaters with heating systems located below the stage floor (usually wood), the Boulder Theater located its heating unit in an adjacent building. The projection room walls were fireproofed, important in an era when the film used was highly-flammable nitrate.  And after consulting with Boulder Building Department, architect Boller increased the number of exits to 10, with 3 from the balcony area. 

The north and south walls of the auditorium display murals set within giant circles. The murals were designed and painted twice by local artist Earl Tryon.  When viewing his initial mural designs (of which we* could find no photos), he decided they didn't relate well to the themes of the new theater design...

So Tryon painted over those images with these colorful trees and flowers, which may have held symbolic meanings for the original inhabitants of this region. In Boulder Valley, the indigenous people were the Utes, who moved west into the mountains when the Southern Arapaho tribe moved into the valley. By 1858, Arapaho Chief Niwot ("left hand") was suggesting that gold-seekers leave the area.  Some seeking gold moved on to try their luck in California, and Chief Niwot now has a village with a nice downtown 9 miles north of Boulder named for him... 

By 1980 Boulder Theater was losing its movie audience to the Crossroads Mall multiplex, and Historic Boulder moved to purchase the building, securing landmark status and the facade easement that saved it from demolition and replacement with a parking lot. They also played an important role in the recent restoration of the facade with current owners, who have been offering concerts in the building for 30 years.  Both Boulder Theater and Boulder County Courthouse* have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 as part of the Downtown Boulder Historic District.  As a result of Historic Boulder's heroic effort to save Boulder Theater from demolition, it also gained status as a National, Colorado and Boulder Historic Landmark in 1980.

*Footnote:  A big thanks to the staff at Boulder's Carnegie Library for Local History, who helped find newspaper articles from 1936 covering the design and construction of Boulder Theater during my visits there. 

The County Courthouse was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2024, not for its architectural style, but for its historic significance as the site where the  first same-sex marriage licenses were issued in 1975. 

Photo Credits:

Top, 2nd & 4th from top:  the author

3rd from top:  Historic Boulder

5th from top:  On the Boulder Reporting Lab website, sourced from Boulder's Carnegie Library for Local History.

6th + 7th & 8th (adjacent mural shots):  Barry Trester

Bottom:  the author

Roadside Attraction: LeMay Museum Part 2-----Independents and Oddballs

Among the roughly 3,000 cars the LeMay family collected, there were plenty from what we'd today label as independent manufacturers.  In this context "independent" means not part of Detroit titans Ford, Chrysler or General Motors.  These car makers included Pierce-Arrow in Buffalo, Willys Overland in Toledo, and Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg in Auburn, Indiana.  And of course they included Detroit's Packard, who produced the cars above during their time as the leader in the upper crust car market.  On the left, a 1923 model, next to a blue '30 and a gray '31, all with Packard's inline 8-cylinder side-valve engine.

The 1919 Stanley Model 735B, made in Watertown, MA, showed the independence of the company's founding brothers F.E. and F.O. Stanley by avoiding an internal combustion engine altogether.  Like all other Stanleys made starting in 1897, it was powered by a steam engine, in this case a rear-mounted 2-cylinder, 20 horsepower unit, while the boiler with famous safety valves was at the front, behind those sleepy-looking headlights...

The Duesenberg J was the flagship of the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg and was featured in Part 1 of this report, but we couldn't resist a closeup of the radiator and hood ornament that fronted the 265 hp,  32-valve twin-cam inline eight.

The 1933 Hupmobile Series I-326 below featured a 302 cubic inch, inline 8 cylinder L-head engine sending 109 hp to the rear wheels through a 3-speed gearbox.  Detroit's Hupp Motor Car Company would fold in 1940, after making the rear-drive Skylark model based on body dies from the discontinued Cord 810 front-drive car from Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg.  For cars from the A-C-D combine, keep reading...

This Auburn Model 850Y cabriolet appeared the year after that Hupmobile, with sweeping new clamshell fenders and a lower, more streamlined profile than earlier Auburns.  The inline eight made by A-C-D's Lycoming Division produced 115 hp from 280 cubic inches, and sent power to the rear wheels through a 3-speed manual gearbox.  

The rumble seat at the rear of the 850Y offered space for 2 passengers, while others could huddle out of the weather under the convertible top.  The colorful, highly detailed '34 styling was part of A-C-D head E.L. Cord's  effort to attract sales during the Great Depression...

So was his second effort to offer an advanced car with front-wheel drive.  The Cord 810 stunned crowds when in appeared at New York's Auto Show in November 1935.  It followed the front-drive Cord L-29 offered from 1930 to '32, but didn't resemble that car, or any other car, in most ways.  For one thing, there was no traditional radiator grille in Gordon Buehrig's streamlined body design; chromed horizontal louvers wrapped around what was quickly named the "coffin nose".  Then there were those hidden headlights, which you cranked up out of the teardrop fenders at night...  

Along with hiding the headlights, Buehrig got rid of the running boards that were then standard features below the door sills (as on that blue Auburn).  The Cord 810 was low enough that you didn't need that step to get in.  A 288 cubic inch V8 drove the front wheels through a 4-speed, electric pre-selector gearbox, and made 115 hp. In 1937, the 812 version added a supercharger that raised power to 190.  Cord also offered Sportsman and Phaeton convertible models, and sticker prices ranged from $1,995 to $3,575. 

With the Great Depression grinding on, though, fewer than 3,000 drivers got a chance to sit behind this control panel, set below a windshield that could be opened for ventilation...

Two years after the last cars offered by Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, Packard built the stately Super 8 convertible for 1939.   The 320 cubic inch inline eight made 135 hp, and the chassis, introduced in '37, featured independent front suspension.

All the fascination wasn't concentrated at the top end of the size or price scale during this period. This 1939 Crosley convertible featured a 2-cylinder, air-cooled engine driving the rear wheels and making about 120 hp less than the Packard, but boasted 50 mpg fuel economy.  The convertible from the Cincinnati company sold for $325 in '39, its first year.  On the same 80 inch wheelbase as the BMC Mini that would show up 2 decades later, it's a charmer...  

Like the Crosley, the 1937 Fiat Topolino (Italian for little mouse) was a front-engined, rear-drive car, and its 569cc inline four made about the same power.  Drivers could make the most of that power with a 4-speed gearbox.  Top speed was similar to the Crosley, around 50 to 53 mph.

The American Bantam was a version of the English Austin built in Butler, PA.  The black and yellow 1939 model at the LeMay is a Hollywood roadster on a 75 inch wheelbase.  The 46 cubic inch inline 4 made 20 hp.  The American Bantam Car Company made the very first Jeep prototype in 1940 in answer to US Army specifications for a light, all-terrain vehicle.  Though Willys and Ford got the big production contracts, Bantam produced Jeeps at the Butler factory throughout the war, and never went back to car production.

Crosley went back to car production after WWII, with a new engine, a 44 cubic inch (750cc) overhead cam inline four that became a favorite of amateur road racers.  From 1949, Crosley offered a 2-door, 4 seat sedan, a wagon, a Hotshot 2 seat roadster good for 85 mph, and this little fire truck, one of which hung out at our neighborhood amusement park near Chicago. 

Before the end of car production in 1952, there was also a fiberglass roadster body called the Skorpion made for the Crosley chassis by a California firm.  The LeMay Museum acquired theirs, one of maybe a hundred, in 2020...

Sales of microcars took off in Europe during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, and one of those was the Messerschmitt KR200 built from 1955 to '64.  A  rear-mounted 191cc two-stroke single cylinder powered the single rear wheel and offered 4 speeds forward or in reverse because crankshaft rotation could be reversed.  The sideways-opening canopy offered access but not much ventilation.

The Isetta 300 made by BMW under license from Italy's Iso was also popular in this period. With a rear-mounted 298cc single-cylinder air cooled 4-stroke sending 13 hp to single rear wheel (4 wheels were an option) through a 4-speed gearbox, it was briefly imported into the US in BMW's 4-wheeled version.  That the design originated from a firm making refrigerators (Iso was from isotherm) sheds new light on that sideways-opening front door, doesn't it?

The LeMay has a collection of pickup trucks from the period before pickups were lifestyle accessories, and were likely to be driven by farmers like my uncle, for example.  The 1947 Studebaker M15 pickup could carry hay bales or construction materials on a 120-inch wheelbase with 80 hp from its flathead six.  It's a friendly-looking thing...

But then, Studebaker seemed to specialize in friendly-looking vehicles during this period. The South Bend, Indiana firm made history with the first truly modern postwar car body with Loewy Studios' design for their '47 model, especially the Starlight Coupe with its wrap-around rear window under a cantilevered roof.  For the 1950 model year, they updated this car with the famous bullet nose...

And by 1951, the year Studebaker brought out their V8 engine, they curved the grille below the nose into a kind of smile.  If the Studey Bullet Nose doesn't make you smile, you may have no sense of humor...

Studebaker's 1963 Avanti went from design sketches to running prototypes in a year, after a top-secret effort by Loewy Studios designers huddled in Palm Springs with an assignment to revive Studebaker's reputation for cutting-edge design. The 4-place GT coupe featured front disc brakes, a built-in padded roll bar, and an aerodynamic fiberglass body with air intake below the bumper, with covered headlights above it.  Supercharged versions of the standard V8 were available to customers, and the car set speed records at Bonneville.

These photos show the inward-curving flanks of the "Coke bottle" fuselage and the rearward slant to the wheel openings that imbue the form with a sense of movement.  Over 4,600 Avantis were sold before Studebaker abandoned US car production during the 1964 model year.  Ford's Mustang arrived to attract the youth market in the middle of that year, and Chevy's 1967 Camaro styling always seemed like a smooth jazz version of the edgy, cool jazz, hipster Avanti.  

Kaiser-Frazer founded its car building operation in 1945 after Henry Kaiser's shipyards had supplied Liberty ships for the war effort.  Though the company tried front-drive prototypes, the production cars offered were mechanically prosaic, with Continental flathead sixes like those in Checker cabs driving the rear wheels.  Body designer Howard "Dutch" Darrin was allowed to supersede his original, slab-sided body design with this glassy, curvy new shell for 1951, and Kaiser offered possibly the first hatchbacks, with up and down opening tailgates in 2 and 4-door versions, in lieu of station wagons.  They kept the outdated flathead six power, though, offering supercharging in 1954.  This 1953 Dragon model with fabric roof cover and special interior trim made 118 hp, but its sticker price of $3,924 would've bought a Chrysler V8.  Because of that price tag, Kaiser sold only 1,277 Dragons.

Ironically, though Kaiser and Willys passenger car production ended in the US after the 1955 model year, Kaiser's Jeep division outlived all the other independents. Kaiser bought Willys- Overland in 1953 for its Jeep division and related government contracts, and it kept American Motors going after that company bought Jeep from Kaiser in 1970.  Renault took a share in AMC Jeep in 1978 and sold the whole company to Chrysler in 1987, with Fiat taking a share in 2009, and Fiat Chrysler merging with PSA (Citroen and Peugeot) to become Stellantis in 2021.  The constant in the three most recent takeovers is the SUV boom in the US, which made the Jeep division a prize in all of them. 

Photo Credits:

3rd, 6th & 11th from top (Stanley, Auburn & Cord) + 3rd & 8th from bottom ((Kaiser + pickup trucks):  Duncan Mackenzie

10 from top (Cord Control Panel):  Wikimedia

All other photos are by the author.